Just another useless personal blog
I know that we geeks are a weird lot, but calendars aren’t all that weird. Except maybe calendars related to an online game, that’s a tad odd. Especially when it’s a pin-up calendar. With scantily clad women that don’t even exist. In spider web bondage.
What kind of freaks do they think we are, anyway?
Oh, right…
Yeesh. My server had been up for almost a full month since the last reboot, but I go away for a week and what happens? A mere eight hours after leaving the house, one of the hard drives flakes out and leaves the system hung for the rest of the week…
For all of the computing progress we’ve made so far, it’s amazing that some things are still so fragile.
All I wanted to do today was install the new NWN expansion, and while it was merrily copying the files to the hard drive it ran into some sort of error and threw up a cryptic dialog box. Normally I’d just restart the install, but oh no, it wasn’t going to be that simple… The expansion pack now no longer recognized that NWN was even installed at all and wouldn’t allow itself to continue.
So, I was going to have to reinstall all of NWN. No problem, I dug out all of the CDs and manuals (damn the bastard who thought printing all the CD keys in the manuals was a good idea) and started a fresh install. After copying all three CDs, it asked for the first disc again, and after putting it in my CD-ROM drive started freaking out. It’s a rather….quirky drive, so I’d gotten used to these little hissy-fits where it would make strange noises, fail to recognize discs, etc., but this time it just sat there continually spinning and making its little choking noises and nothing I could do would stop it; it ignored the eject button, and attempting to bring up the system manager would just hang forever. So, I eventually had to give up and just hit the big ‘ol reset button.
Of course, since the install wasn’t quite finished yet and I’d forcibly aborted it, I had to redo it all over again…
You’d think we’d be able to build tools and programs that are better at monitoring their own state, repairing themselves, and recovering from errors cleanly. We always like to take the easy way out though, and when a simple “eh, just try reinstalling it” works, doing it properly becomes a much lower priority. Especially when it’s just a silly game…
Apparently a father and his son had decided that their pit bull was too old to fight anymore, so of course in their mind the only logical thing to do was drown it. However, they only managed to succeed in drowning themselves.
“The pit bull is still alive and unharmed.”
Does anyone want to buy the full-screen version of the Scarface DVD?
I wanted the widescreen version, of course, but it wasn’t until I’d put it in the player, hit Play Movie, and saw the ‘edited-for-your-screen’ notice that I realized I had the wrong one. I was quite surprised as this is the first time I’d ever picked up the wrong version of a movie. I looked at the case and saw the “Full Screen” lettering right at the bottom of the front, so I accepted that I’d just plain screwed up; I must have been in too much of a hurry, or assumed it would be widescreen since it was an ‘anniversary edition’, or just plain forgotten to check.
So today, when I went to pick up the right version, I checked to make sure it was the widescreen one. I found the rack with them, checked the front of the box, and…it said nothing. It turns out that although it mentions whether it’s full or widescreen on the front of the plastic case, it *doesn’t* say so on the front of the cardboard box wrapped around the case. It does say so on the spine of the box, but in easily-missed tiny print near the edge.
I’m still a dumbass for not checking in the first place, but come on Hollywood, don’t make this even more difficult. If you’ve got a rack full of the same movie in two different versions but the front doesn’t tell you which one it is, that’s just asking for trouble — I’m probably going to glance over them all, not see any difference, and think that there’s only one version there.
Silly spammers, I crush you like bug!
It did catch me off guard though; I’d never even thought of the possibility spammers would start making comments in blogs, guestbooks, and such automatically. I shouldn’t have been surprised though, as I’ve had to deal with spammers advertising in game forums before.
Fortunately there are already filters and plugins available to help stop them, for MT at least.
You thought the RIAA was bad? It appears that ASCAP is also joining the Evil club.
The whole process of detemining who has the right to collect money for anything music-related is fairly complex, but the way they’re going about it here is outright extortion. “No, we haven’t proven you’ve violated any licenses, but pay us anyway or we’ll sue you into oblivion.” Even if they could win, the legal fees alone would bankrupt most clubs and bars.
It’s reminiscent of how Microsoft would force computer vendors to pay for DOS licenses for every machine sold, even if it didn’t ship with DOS on it…
The War on Spam is getting to the point where you need better automated tools; having to manually adjust procmail filters for every new trick was quickly becoming annoying.
So, I finally decided to give SpamAssassin a whirl. It’s always been highly recommended but I’d been a bit hesitant to use it since it looked like it might be overkill. It’s the kind of thing you install to handle spam across entire corporate networks (we use it at work here too), so I was expecting something sendmail-like in its difficulty to configure and admin. It turned out to be pretty painless, though — do the ‘make install’, set up the .forward and .procmailrc files (the samples included work just fine), and ta-da, you’re done and your e-mail is now being spam-filtered.
The important question is, of course: does it work? The answer is yes…and no. So far it has caught a good number of spam messages and not accidentally flagged any valid e-mail as false positives. There are however still a few types of messages making it through the filter:
1) Viruses. Unfortunately Swen and its ilk are still circulating around the net far too much, and with little text in the message to parse and none of the spammer’s tricks being used, it’s hard for SpamAssassin to catch these. Technically it’s not really SA’s job to catch viruses; I’ll have to find another package and use it to do additional virus filtering instead.
2) Short, generic spam. These are those messages with vague subjects like “hi”, “lose it”, “can u spend few mins?” etc. and worded like a friendly greeting. Since most of the usual spammer’s tricks are missing, SA can’t judge these very well.
However, there is hope for the latter case: SA uses ‘Bayesian filtering’ to attempt to learn what spam looks like. If I keep feeding messages like those to the database, it should eventually start to be able to tell the difference between them and valid e-mail and start filtering them automatically. In theory, anyway. Only time will tell how well it will work, as it has to build up a history first.
In the meantime I still have to handle those viruses and some spam messages manually. It’s still better than no filtering at all though, and using the SA tools to teach it about the spam it misses isn’t too much of a hassle.
Searching the Alaska Sex Offender Registry reveals that there are indeed five registered sex offenders in that state named Chester.
At least none of them have the middle name Wayne…
(Am I bored? Why yes, yes I am.)
Monica Bonvicini said visitors would have to “defy their own embarrassment” to use the minimalist cubicle, made from one-way mirrored glass.
It is impossible to see into the toilet, which will be free to use, but the person inside can see passers-by. — BBC
I finally got around to buying a proper set of headphones for my portable music. Unfortunately, I was focusing primarily on making sure that they were light and unobtrusive — I have a fantastic quality set of headphones at home already, but they’re big and bulky and shut out nearly all other sound, which doesn’t make them very practical for day-to-day casual use. That led me to a set of Sony headphones that only cost around $16, but they seemed to be just what I was looking for.
Of course, they turned out to be utter crap. Too much of the sound leaks away, especially high frequencies, the headband is some cheap plastic that I swear is going to break within a month, and the jack is ultra-quirky. The slightest shift causes crackling, volume fading, and the right channel vanishing entirely.
I’m probably going to have to go down to somewhere like A&B Sound to find a *true* decent set of headphones that won’t break easily, sound good, and work reliably, and it’ll probably cost an arm and a leg. Of course, there are limits…
An artist has created a usable public toilet in a glass cube to challenge the curiosity – and bravery – of people passing London’s Tate Britain gallery.