The Spam Files III

Subject: Don't forget your superman pill!

Forget that, where can I get myself some Batman pills?

Subject: Adult Shop - Movie Section!!! strickland

Do they also sell propane and propane accessories?

Subject: STOP PAYING FOR YOUR Pay_Per_View_Movies IX:z8gon26923

But if I didn’t pay for them, then they wouldn’t be pay-per-view…

Subject: sheee miiiight saaaaaay it's too haaaard

Aaaaand iiiiit miiiight giiiiive heeeer aaaa speeeeech impeeeedimeeeent tooooo.

Subject: what if you had.. battalion maggot

Is that a new Warhammer 40K figurine?

Subject: Loving yourself is the begenning of loving life!

Hey, it’s none of your business how I ‘love myself’…

Speaking of Music…

I’ve been on a bit of a CD-buying binge lately.

Velvet Revolver, “Contraband”: Yeah, it’s a gimmick band, but I’m actually enjoying it a fair bit. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s mostly solid earache rock. There’s a couple of slower ‘ballads’ that seem a bit out-of-place, but that’s pretty much obligatory for this type of music.

Sonic Youth, “Sonic Nurse”: This one was on a recommendation; I hadn’t actually heard any Sonic Youth since sometime in the early ’90s. Definitely not for everyone, with their oft-noise-ish feel, and I don’t care for a couple of the tracks, but there’s a lot to like too. In particular I’d recommend “Unmade Bed”, “Dripping Dream”, “Stones”, and “Paper Cup Exit”.

The Killers, “Hot Fuss”: I’d never heard of these guys before, but I heard a couple songs while doing other shopping in HMV and liked them but didn’t know who it was, so I googled the lyrics later on and picked up the album itself a few days later. Average overall, but a few tracks are new favourites (“Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine”, “Smile Like You Mean It”, “Somebody Told Me”) and I wouldn’t really call any of them bad.

And Depeche Mode, “Music For The Masses.” Hey, it was five bucks.

There was also a cheap movie binge, but it’ll take longer to work through those…

The Never-Ending Search

To hell with it, maybe I should just get an iPod after all. The fourth-generation ones are out now, with the clicky-wheel from the mini-iPod, better battery life, and a lower price (I can live without the dock and case). It still doesn’t have the other features I’d like, but it’s better to have something at all than to chase a ‘perfect’ goal forever…

The problem then becomes one of management. I’d obviously need iTunes in order to load songs, manage playlists, and so on, but of the three systems I have, all of the songs are stored on the Linux file server, the one where iTunes isn’t available. There isn’t enough room to mirror the entire library on the iBook, and I don’t have FireWire or even USB2 on the Windows system (which I’d prefer to avoid and is also low on space).

Fortunately you can add songs to an iTunes library from a network share, so I can do all of the management from the iBook, but then that creates a couple more problems. First, it doesn’t seem to let me edit ID3 tags on songs in the library that are from a network share. Whether this is a limitation of iTunes or a permissions problem or what isn’t clear yet, so I still need to do some investigation there.

The second problem is that now I have a redundant data problem. Although I can’t fit my whole music library on the iBook, I *do* have a subset of my favourite tracks loaded on it so I can listen to them while roaming. Adding the songs from the network share makes the local ones show up twice in the library, and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the local one and which is the remote one (idea to Apple: smart playlists based on filename/path). What I really need is two separate libraries, one just for the networked songs and one for the local copies, but iTunes just has one big library per user.

There is a way around it though, if you cheat a bit. Since everything is stored in ~/Music/iTunes, all I had to do was take the existing directory, rename it to iTunes.local, restart iTunes and add the network songs to the now-empty library, quit iTunes, and rename the newly-recreated iTunes directory to iTunes.remote. Now all I have to do is make ~/Music/iTunes a symbolic link to whichever library I want to work on at the time before starting iTunes. (If I were really lazy I’d make wrapper scripts to do it automatically from the Dock or Finder.)

It’s a bit of a kludge, but should work well enough. Now where are all those pennies…

Two Down, 8142 To Go

Well I’ve finally managed to finish Knights Of The Old Republic and Morrowind: Tribunal and knocked them off the pile.

KotOR’s storyline might not be great literature, but it was still fun and well-executed. The underlying engine is hidden very well under a nice interface for better immersion, the graphics are great on the PC version, the voice acting was excellent, and so on. I’ll definitely be picking up KotOR2.

Tribunal was largely more-of-the-same of Morrowind, which is pretty much expected of an expansion pack, but it did get a few things right where the original game was a bit lacking. The challenge level was reasonable for a character nearing completion of the main quest, so it wasn’t just a cakewalk even if you had all the best items already. The ability to list quests in progress was also extremely welcome — all too often you’d be on multiple quests simultaneously but your progress on some of them would get buried dozens of pages back in the journal, making it hard to tell what you need to do next.

I think they also did a much better job of city and dungeon design in Tribunal. The original game has a ton of dungeons, which helps promote the feeling that you’re in a vast world open for exploration, but far too many of them were way too similar in layout and style, even along the main quest. In Tribunal they are for the most part more distinctive and sensibly laid out.

Now to finish off Icewind Dale and start Morrowind: Bloodmoon…

(though I’m tempted to just abandon IWD; the story is kind of dull, and for combat and such it’s just not as impressive post-BG2)

Shoulda Stayed In Bed

I just spent most of the day integrating the final InstallShield changes necessary for our next release of a client product to properly support the new firewall rules in the upcoming XP SP2.

About three minutes after I sent out the e-mail announcing the availability of the next build for QA, the first one to incorporate the SP2 changes, a manager stopped by and told me that Microsoft had just announced that there will be an SP1 for Server 2003. Apparently this SP1 will also incorporate some sort of firewall/security updates, and we’ll probably hold off on our SP2 update until we can incorporate the 2003 changes as well.

*sigh*

Yahoo Goes Nuts

Looking through the logs, I’ve been seeing some strange queries from Yahoo’s crawler recently:

[19/Jul/2004:21:34:09 -0600] "GET /MadonnaCiconne/parcel-problems/mboic.htm HTTP/1.0"
[19/Jul/2004:21:43:14 -0600] "GET /ambush/000122.htm HTTP/1.0"
[20/Jul/2004:05:21:00 -0600] "GET /sis/000186/favorpopscandy.htm HTTP/1.0"
[20/Jul/2004:07:20:38 -0600] "GET /lokalen_pa_nett.htm HTTP/1.0"

It’s like bits and pieces of legitimate paths on my site are getting mixed in with random keywords. Either their crawler has gone a bit bonkers, or some other site out there is making up random links and it’s trying to follow those…

const me = dumdum;

I can never keep these straight since I keep forgetting the exact rules around pointer type qualifiers, so for my own reference:

const X * foo;    // Cannot change what is being pointed at, can change the pointer
    foo = &bar;   // Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Not Allowed
X const * foo;    // Equivalent to the above
X * const foo;    // Cannot change the pointer value, can change what is pointed at
    foo = &bar;   // Not Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Allowed
const X * const foo; // Cannot change either the pointer value or the target
    foo = &bar;   // Not Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Not Allowed

Prepare For Takeof*crash*

Digging through my pile of older CDs, I found my Flight Simulator 2000 discs. I popped it in and gave it another whirl and…now I remember why they should never, ever let me anywhere near the cockpit of a plane. Not even seated nearby, lest I infect the crew with Bad Piloting vibes.

I do miss the ‘old-school’ slightly-less-realistic combat flight sims like F-19 and ATF though. You didn’t have to be a perfect pilot, and it was still fun to fly around and just Blow Stuff Up. Unfortunately they don’t run or look so well on today’s machines, and modern flight sims seem to be a dying genre, and overly focused on realism. I’ve been out of touch with the genre though, so maybe there’s a recent gem hidden away somewhere…

This Sentence Continued On Page 2

I like The Onion, but they recently underwent a slight site redesign and now things are a bit…spread out. For example, the main stories are split into two pages now, which I didn’t realize at first until I scrolled down a bit after thinking that one of them seemed a bit short. The motive here is fairly obvious: get more separate page views in order to get more advertisements in, or entice people into premium subscriptions. Fair enough, we’re reading it for free after all so we don’t really have much room to complain.

When they go so far as to put each individual single-paragraph News In Brief blurb on a separate slow-loading page though… Well, I still don’t have much room to complain. But it’s still annoying.

Gourmet It Ain’t

If you’re really lazy and want to avoid showering, getting dressed, going out, and restocking on milk and margarine or butter, vegetable oil and water make an acceptable substitute in your Kraft Dinner. Only use a *tiny* little amount though, just enough to make it unstick and mix nicely…

Sucked Back In

Well, I was sitting around thinking to myself “Gee, what are you going to do with your copious free time now that the current project at work is wrapping up?” when I suddenly learned that the new Diablo II Ladder season has started. So much for all that free time…

I had put D2 on the back burner for a while partly due to a lack of time and partly because, despite the efforts of the 1.10 patch, the ladder realm had become tainted by hacks and dupes, and after a while there was also the lingering threat of the end-of-season ladder reset. No point in starting a ladder character if the ladder season’s going to end in a month…

Hopefully the hacking won’t be as bad this time around since there’s no new patch to introduce more holes (though it did still occur in 1.10, it was at least greatly reduced), and maybe I’ll actually get around to finishing off the Hell difficulty and completing the world event this season. There are also 23 new runewords, increasing the odds I’ll actually be able to complete one. There’s also some contest going on, though it’ll almost certainly be won by some bot-assisted 24-hour-playing kiddie…

Oh, and this time around I can connect with both my PC and iBook at the same time. No, I’m not dextrous enough to play both at the same time, but it will allow me to transfer items to ‘mule’ characters safely instead of the risky drop-on-the-ground-and-quickly-switch-characters-and-rejoin-the-game method, and having a second player in the game increases the amount of xp you get and the quantity of loot dropped, even if the second isn’t doing anything.