Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn't in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as "worth reading".
It is not really a bad book, but when you've just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you'll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it's promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry's throat. But Harry's thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl's pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn't even look up her skirt when she's riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.
I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could've brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.
Tell me that wouldn't have been sweet! Now, though, I've got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I'm already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!
Hmm...you know you're an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it's completely, utterly the opposite of you:
When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.
I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I've Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?
OS/2 I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.
NeXT[sic] I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it's probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs' playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it's lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.
BeOS In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you'll be hating life.
DESQview This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck's QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?
GEOS / GeoWorks GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.
I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?
This is one of those books that I spent a lot of energy avoiding back in High School. I'm not sure why, now that I finally did read it. It's only about 200 pages, and is a funny, easy read. I read a page here and there for a couple of weeks, then tore through the last 180 pages while sitting in Amsterdam last week with nothing to do. When I was done, I left it sitting on the bench for Trustafarian weed-tourists to puzzle over. It's probably still sitting there.
The plot is very basic, with most of it happening during a two-day stretch of some protracted American Civil War battle. The 'tagonist (an- or pro- is a bit tough to make out sometimes) develops mightily during this short stretch. The ending of the book is sad and sweet, and left me a little weepy, sitting full of thought at the departure terminal of Schiphol. The arc of redemption experienced by young Master Fleming is from cowardice to determination, from youthful bluster to open honesty. The transformation is very human, and touching.
It was nice to read something that didn't have Yodas or Elves for a change. I'll get back to slogging through Harry Potter now. I've decided to liven it up a bit by drawing little dongs on the pages that have both Hermione and Ron in them. (Two if Seamus is there chicka-chicka-bow!).
It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
I am but a humble man, an Engineer of sorts. I realize that in the rarified world of theoreticals, being a technological doesn't carry much status. At the cocktail parties of science, I will be served the well Scotch, and not the single malts from the top shelf. Nevertheless, I have something to ask of you, and beg just a moment of your attention.
I have become convinced that science, by which I mean you scientists, is intent on destroying the human race. Please stop this. I am not referring to intractable flesh golems when I say this. Nor do I mean trying to prove that Black Holes exist by creating them right in the middle of United States, my goodness what could possibly go wrong with that.
I'm not against the accidental Icarus-style destruction associated with flying too high, delving too deep. This is how races are supposed to be snuffed out of existence. What I am referring to is the systematic intent to destroy humanity.
Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)
The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects.
In 1998, scientists discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that had the astonishing ability to "immortalize" certain kinds of cells that normally died within a short time. When that discovery was announced to the public, the press put an almost inevitable spin on it: aging was about to become an artifact of the past. Never mind that the scientists in question never claimed that telomerase had anything to do with the lifespan of humans: the discovery became a story because it appealed to our ancient interest in cheating death and living forever. A huge, lucrative industry now caters to that interest, offering the public pills, potions, and powders that are meant to reverse and undo the effects of aging.
As if men didn't have enough to worry about, our two main functions have been wiped away with Exhibits A and B. Our tertiary role, that of continuance of the species, is mopped up by Exhibit C. Obviously, science, you don't know the first thing about being a man.
Every now and then, you'll see something and think, man, that would make one badass movie. Things like, Survivor Type , by Stephen King, for example; or this week's National Geographic podcast, Giant Sea Spiders Found. But if there were a List of Things That Would Be a Badass Movie, the #1 slot would belong to a certain Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz.
Who is this Captain William "BJ" Blazkowicz, you ask? Well, he's just the guy blasted his way into the most heavily-guarded stronghold of insane Nazi medical experimentation, killing everything and everyone in his path, including Hitler in an enormous Assault Mech Powered Armor Suit. Twice. That's who.
In my spare time, I often google around for old games, obsolete software, and other things that feed my cognitive dissonance. The other night, while finishing my beer and planning another evening of tossing-and-turning insomnia, I came across this, and promptly slept like a baby:
On August 3, 2007, GameSpot reported that
Variety confirmed Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that the writer/producer team that was involved with Silent Hill will be involved with the Wolfenstein project.
Sadly, another entry on The List was Doom 3, which was made into a shitty, boring movie two years ago. But how, how, could anyone make a shitty movie about this?
Nazis raising the dead, bloodied-up steampunky cyborg Super-Soldiers, and a gun-wielding leather-clad Dominatrix. What's not to love? Plus, the people making the movie are the guys who made Silent Hill. That film, you might recall, featured Hot Large-Breasted Zombie Nurses:
Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
