dannyman.toldme.com : dannyman

August 5, 2005
Technical

blog-to-nntp

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/08/05/blog-to-nntp/

So, I’m not alone in this crazy fantasy . . .

I have been thinking that I’d like a web-based aggregator that doesn’t suck. Bloglines is all about the frames, Rojo is all about not actually working right, and Yahoo! and Google “ig” are just little sticky-notes-in-a-portal . . .

And I was thinking about back-end storage of data. Multi-master replication? BAH! And then I said, well, there’s always NNTP. NNTP is a system of multi-master replication for the ancestors of blog posts . . .

So, you’d need: (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/08/03/recent-premonitions/

August 3, 2005
Religion, Sundry

Recent Premonitions

I’m not superstitious.

A while back, a server crashed, and shortly before the page hit my sidekick, I dreamt that a server had crashed.

I just took a call from a guy who says I won a free lunch. (more…)

August 2, 2005
Religion

The Engrish Bible

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/08/02/engrish-bible/

Ever try to read the Bible? It can take a lot of effort. The original version was in Biblical Hebrew, and had no vowels. Later scholars “interpreted” this source material, filling in the vowels. This was in turn translated into Latin, which informs much of our English translation of the Good Book.

I was thinking, just for fun, to run the Book of Genesis through Babelfish to Japanese and back again. Just to see if the “Engrish Bible” might be at all entertaining. “I barely understood the Japanese translation in Japan,” said Yayoi. I think the English is hard to follow.

Without further ado, the Book of Genesis, as translated into Engrish. Just remember, if you think this version is messed up, the version you are used to has been translated twice, and originally had no vowels! (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/29/dinner-at-google/

July 29, 2005
Technology

Dinner at Google

We carpooled down from Oakland. “Ah, the old country,” I remarked, as we sped south down 101 past San Antonio Road. Mountain View was home to so many of us when we first moved to California, during the boom.

The Google campus is at the edge of the Shoreline recreation area. There’s a tranquil view of Shoreline’s rolling yellow hills, which must provide a pleasing hint of seasonality when the rains green them in the spring.

Entering the Google Campus was like stepping into a land of enchantment comparable for geeks to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Every building has its variant of the free snack pantry. I gobbled a few malted milk balls, and later some chocolate peanut clusters. Yum! Matt remarked that at Yahoo! The snacks aren’t free but the coffee is manned by professional baristas, which might be cool, if he drank coffee. (more…)

July 25, 2005
Biography, Sundry

Sun Jul 31 :: HOUSE WARMING + BIRTHDAY PARTY

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/25/sunday-party/

                    !!! SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY !!!

                     !!! NOON 'til WHENEVER !!!

     Danny and Yayoi will host a laid-back open house and birthday
     party at their new (as of last November) apartment in Walnut
     Creek.

     Whose birthday?  Yayoi!  How old?  A PRIME NUMBER!

     Friends, neighbors, friends of friends, neighbors of friends,
     friends of neighbors, children, grandparents, and other
     generally good people are welcome to drop by and participate.

     We will feature:
     - BIRTHDAY CAKE
     - SNACKS
     - BEVERAGES
     - A picturesque view of MOUNT DIABLO
     - Furniture

     Of course, if you like to bring stuff, you are welcome, but
     you are in no way obligated.

     Yayoi likes to play fun strategy games, so, we might spend
     some time playing "Settlers of Cataan" or "Ticket to Ride" so
     if you like that sort of stuff, there ya go.

     Depending how things shake out and who shows up and when and
     whatnot, we might wander off to eat, drink, make merry
     elsewhere, or we might eat pizza.  You never know, do you?

     Nitty gritty:
     - If you plan to come, maybe just maybe let us know?
     - dannyman@toldme.com OR yayoi@toldme.com
     - <Contact us for tele ###s>

     Directions:
     <Contact us for directions.>

     We look forward to seeing you whenever we do see you.

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/23/yoghurt-culture/

July 23, 2005
Free Style

Genetic and Memetic Substrates

Recently, as in the past half year or so, I read that early on in the development of life, a long long time ago when we were all just primitive, one-cell organisms, with only the most basic cellular structures, or maybe we were only basic cellular structures, but way back then, we exchanged genetic programming like people exchange ideas today — we just passed the DNA right from one organism to another.

It worked pretty well, of course, because we were mostly very similar. I think I read that some of the most basic life forms extant today still do this . . . at the viral level, or so, they can just pop off a bit of DNA and another organism will pick it up and try it out.

This blew my mind, because it compared philosophically with memesis. That, a long time later, we develop language, and when we have enough organisms that share the same lingual code, we can form ideas into coded chains of syllables and pop them off to try and influence the function of other organisms. (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/23/wordpress-comment-spam/

July 23, 2005
Technical

WordPress Comment Spam

If you have a blog, you will get comment spam. Comment spam is like fax spam or e-mail spam except its people trying to sell stuff by posting advertising in comments to your blog.

There’s all sorts of crazy solutions you can try. A version or so back I put in one nice little plugin that simply required the web browser to do some math in JavaScript, and comments would only be posted if the math was done right.

A lot of the more complicated solutions sound a little half-baked, annoying, too much work, or just plain insane. I absolutely hate some of the “type in the word that appears in this image” because half the time I can barely make it out with my feeble HUMAN eyes … argh!

Well, I just read an even simpler solution, and since I was working on my comments.php I thought I’d give it a shot. It basically boils down to: (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/22/wordpress-backslash-literal-entities/

July 22, 2005
Technical, WordPress

WordPress: How to type a Backslash

WordPress rocks. It is blog software that drives much of this web site. WordPress rocks, it does, except for a few things it sucks at, like printing backslashes.

They’re taken care of the BR-in-PRE stuff, but I still have trouble with backslashes. They don’t get displayed unless you type two backslashes, but there seems to be another preprocessor that sucks out backslashes when you edit the post, and typing \\ into the web just seems so wrong.

But you can use HTML entity references. These are HTML escape codes for character literals. Here are a few potentially handy ones: (more…)

8 Comments

July 21, 2005
Technical

Shell HOWTO: Remove Duplicate Elements from a Variable

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/21/shell-variable-unique-elements/

If you are a seasoned Unix admin, you’ve been doing stuff like this for years:

cat $file | sort | uniq

Which is a handy way to eliminate duplicate lines in a file, or a collection of files. The uniq -c will even tell you how many duplicated lines there are, and you might even do:

cat $file | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

For example, you could run a command like this to see who is receiving the most mail on your system:

awk ’{print $7}’ < /var/log/maillog | grep ^to= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Anyway, even if you are a seasoned Unix admin, you probably aren’t a big expert on shell scripting. (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/19/peanut-butter-mochi/

July 19, 2005
Technology

Peanut butter Mochi

Yayoi came home from Japantown today. She was excited. “You must try this new product,” she explained.

It was a flat, pink, gelatinous food substance. Mochi! Mochi is basically a a bland, dry, rice-based(?) wrapper for snacks, like “mochi ice” which is a lump of ice cream wrapped in mochi. (Think of it as a flexible cracker for snacks.) (more…)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/19/amen-kinky-friedman/

July 19, 2005
Politics

Amen, Kinky Friedman!

“When George W. was governor, we executed a man every two weeks on average. I want to put an end to that. I hate for you to have to hear this from a Jew, but what would Jesus do about this? Would Jesus be interested in these men’s death or their salvation? That’s what you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re a Christian.”

To which this Atheist replies, “Amen, Kinky Friedman!”

If you live in Texas, you might want to save your vote for Kinky in next year’s gubernatorial primary.

If you don’t live in Texas, you could drop a few bucks on his campaign.

July 9, 2005
Technical

Reboot

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/09/reboot/

There’s nothing like a downed remote machine at 7AM on a Saturday morning that will get you up to speed with the workings of your terminal server, and your datacenter operations staff.

Thank you, Cyclades!
Thank you, Nick at Abovenet!

Fortunately, it was a backup component that failed in a very scary the-harddrive-has-crashed way, but a reboot cleared that up. Now, if I can just figure out how this other thing I set up on the machine gets restarted, I can go back to being lazy. :)

The weirdest thing, and I am not bullshitting, the weirdest thing is that right before the pager went off for the first time, I was dreaming that my manager said “bad news” and started to explain that a disk failure on far more important machine had been detected. As I started to mull that over, my Sidekick started to beep. Is there such a thing as SysAdmin ESP, or do I dream of such things all the time, I just don’t remember them? Weird, man, weird!