So, after two failed attempts to upgrade eSupport, frustrated that a company that sells a support/helpdesk product doesn’t have all of its useful information right there in their own install of their own helpdesk product … I could go for a burrito. I call the girlfriend, do we have any cash? But no, she has a dollar, after I handed her the $25 in my pocket for her trip with the neighbor to Target last night.
“I could make pasta.”
“Dude, I could tell you didn’t want pasta,” my colleague admits. That is okay … we’ll get paid Friday. (more…)
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A bite of Milky Way chased by a sip of hot, French Roast coffee.
“Yeah, chocolate and coffee go great together, it’s like a mocha in your mouth,” says Dennis.
I’ll testify to that!
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You know what’s lame? I frequently log in to Linux boxen and try to invoke “vim” only to get “command not found.” Now, this would be reasonable on Solaris or BSD, where they maintain their own version of vi, but in Linux, vi is vim, only it is vi, and not vim. Why? … It seems so pretentious. “Vim? You mean ‘vee eye?’ I got one of them, sure, although it is just vim … but you’ll have to type vi. You know, that’s how it is done on Unix systems.”
Or is there some GNU vi that is going around?
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Best article lead I have read in a very long time:
Back in the good old days, strong men such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey went screaming across the great American highways with heads hopped full of sour mash and benzedrine. They performed lewd acts, taunted the police, harassed the stiffs and produced great art. These days we’re left with four twenty-something geeks traveling country roads at 10 mph with their Segways, iPods and blogs.
Okay, get this. A guy is going to journey across this great land of ours … on a Segway scooter.
That could be a respectible adventure in and of itself, but he’s going to be followed, at ten miles an hour, by three buddies in a “support car” holding 16 backup batteries, and a bunch of toys, merrily blogging their adventures the whole way through. The Register continues to pound out great copy:
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were also said to have debated the use of text messaging on their trip across the US. In the end, however, they decided that a fridge full of acid-laced orange juice would be a more profound use of technology. For Kerouac, there was but a typewriter, gallons of red wine and meth.
(more…)
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Jon Roma got me thinking, by quoting a speech from Senator Robert Byrd:
We are at a dangerous time in our Republic. The Constitution — the very foundation of this great country — is under attack by a presidency that is bent upon secrecy, that has to be dragged kicking and screaming to answer questions, and that follows a path of utter recklessness. Its policies have changed the face of America around the globe from that of a giant peacemaker to that of a schoolyard bully. People who once declared strong allegiance with America now question our purpose.
I supported the war. A lot of that is because the Middle East has been dangerously stuck in the past, and the few Iraqis I’ve met all seemed seriously haunted by Saddam Hussein, and the unfinished Gulf War in 1991, when they thought “liberation” may have been at hand. I even defended the distasteful way that Bush went about starting the war — by being a unilateralist bully — because we have had a tendancy to invade other countries, throughout our history, whenever we found it politically convenient, and I don’t see this changing any time soon. The “benefit” is that Americans and those in other countries who love America are reminded that, despite our martyrdom on 9/11, we are not perfect — we are a reckless, arrogant people, and there should be some wariness in dealings with America. (more…)
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From Yahoo! News:
HELSINKI (Reuters) – A number of Finnish conscripts have been excused their full term of military service because they are addicted to the Internet, the Finnish Defence Forces says.
Ah, Finland! Back in 1994 I volunteered for military service. I was a hard-core computer geek, and one argument my Mother employed to try and dissuade me from enlisting was that I would be away for my computer for a very long time. While that would be hard, I viewed such separation as a character-building exercise, a valuable component of military service.
(Though, I did skip out on the Marine Corps after the recruiter told me that telephone access for Marines was generally two payphones per fifty grunts. In the Army at least I had a prayer of some day gaining access to a modem.)
These Finnish men get no free pass, however, they simply get a deferrment, some growing up time:
“They get sent home for three years and after that they have to come back … “
82% of Finnish men serve in the armed forces. That number is a lot better than we have here in the United States.
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From The John Kerry Loyalty Quiz:
Your score is 9 on a scale of 1 to 10. You are a pure, unabashed, die-hard John Kerry supporter. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing Kerry run Bush and Cheney out of the White House, except maybe seeing them dragged away in handcuffs.
From The George W. Bush Loyalty Quiz:
Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been a miserable failure as president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs.
Zero on a scale of one to ten!? I am truly an underachiever when it comes to false patriotism!
Thanks for the link, Chip Taylor!
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You know, it started rough, but John Kerry gave a great speech last night. He stuck it to the President and his cronies, he decried Corporate Welfare, and he looked like a President, which should hopefully make it easier for non-Democrats to put him in the White House.
I don’t know if John Kerry gets the credit for this, or if it was the lack of sleep the night before, but I, for one, slept better after the speech last night.
Nobody is voting for Nader any more. Kerry will win, and he will make our nation better.
I am disappointed that the networks only covered the speech, and not all the great stuff from the hour before. His daughters gave two awesome speechs about their daddy. And the stuff with the Veterans is great. A “Band of Brothers” indeed — I’ve read this elsewhere, but Kerry is a man who has earned the trust of many through a life of honest hard work. He should be our President!
www.JohnKerry.com
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I just received a bulk mailing from the Democratic National Committee, designed to look like some express courier message. Yayoi received one as well. They each had an identical “package tracking number” printed on the front, and computer-generated blue-pen “handwriting.”
It is from John Kerry:
Dear Fellow Democrat,
I am rushing this message to you just hours after accepting the Democratic nomination.
That’s really impressive, considering that I received it via the United States Postal Service two days before he is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination.
You may already be a winner!
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lnk.to has to relocate, like, this week.
What is lnk.to, you might ask? Well, lnk.to will take a long link, and make a very short link to it. If you have to give someone a URL, it is handier to give them a shorter URL. Have you ever tried to send someone a link to Yahoo Maps? Then, you know what I mean.
Phase 0: Classic lnk.to
So, my think is to re-implement lnk.to, and duplicate the current functionality — you can add a link, see the recent links, see, perhaps, the most popular links, which are all just porn anyway … but this time there’s an option for “private” link.
It’ll be re-written in this format, from scratch, with a proper, clean Perl Object back-end to a MySQL database.
Phase 1: my.lnk.to
Next, we’ll use mod_rewrite to get even a bit more cleverer. If you go, say, to dman.lnk.to, you’ll go to dman‘s lnk.to. This will be a chain of like 25 links maintained by the user dman. dman will have his own RSS export and other neat things that could facilitate export to people’s blogrolls. dman can share his account with friends, if he likes, basically sharing links around.
Phase 2: my.lnk.to/friends
The user model will be extended to allow users to add RSS feeds from which to populate links. “Virtual” RSS-only users will be creatable, and users will be allowed to list out who their friends are. Using that “friends” interface, a handy aggregator can be fashioned.
Behind the scenes, we see code extension — I write a “link chain” interface for Phase 0. Phase 1 requires a “user interface” and management extensions to the “link chain” interface. Phase 2 then sees extensions to the “user interface” …
I have a few other cute ideas to toss in there, which might crank up the fun a bit … dang this day job! Dang this lack of infinitely-flexible server resources! Ah, well, it forces me to think a great deal, measure several times, and make, I hope, one awesome cut!
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I spent way too much time trying to track down this eBay phisher. Instead of exploiting someone’s Formmail.pl they apparently purchased a fraudulent account, and uploaded a PHP script that pulls a bunch of addresses from a databases and spams them all. So, qmail logs the messages as coming from Apache, whereas Formmail.pl would have been wrapped through suexec. And since one invocation can send thousands of messages, there’s no suspicious log activitity.
Fortunately, the contents of the spam message were stored in the PHP script. I finally ran a find-pipe-grep on our vhosts directory for ‘ebay.com’ and shut the slimey bastard sonuvabitch down. The HTTP requests to trigger the script came from Egypt at like 4AM local time.
Grr! Let’s waste my morning on nonsense.
Then we got another spam complaint for another shared hosting server, but after some basic checking, I wrote them back indicating that the header was forged, and they wanted to instead contact a cable company in Japan.
Time to take a walk, unwind, get some real work done, perhaps.
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As posted to WordPress Hacks:
Hey. I wanted to be able to see posts that had been “recently modified” as opposed to the date posted. This way I can add entries out-of-order, but still advertise them on my sidebar.
I hacked the get_archives() function to add a recentlymod option. You can see the following function call in use under “Recent Posts.”
get_archives('recentlymod', 7);
The hack is available at http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/wp-template-functions-general.diff.
Personally, I would like WP to have an admin feature to distinguish between post_date and post_modified … a toggle I could set somewhere to ensure that my RSS feed was behaving as “Recent Posts” does.
Now I can post stories from my World Tour (still not finished yet!?) and my readers will have a clue that new material has appeared.
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