Ok I updated to 1.5.1.1 - And it broke the RSS link at the bottom of the page - I fixed it by modifing wp-content/themes/default/footer.php to remove feed: now the links work on the fronst page.
Ok I have a Palm Pilot m500. Which I love! Yesterday it fell out of my pocket during a meeting and I had a frantic 30 minutes while I searched for it. This made me realize that I haven’t synced the Pilot on my new laptop. It turns out that the last time I sync’d was over two months ago - sure I put it in the cradle to charge once a month - but no backup. This is not a good situation
So I hooked up my Pilot to my laptop fired up J-Pilot and hit sync. No joy! Some kind of error. Now you have to understand that the way Palm + USB + Linux works is a little weird. You see the Pilot isn’t recognized by Linux until you push the Hot Sync button on the palm itself. This fires up the USB connection which tells Linux to create a couple of devices ttyUSB0/1 . Then J-Pilot checks for those an syncs. I could see the kernel add the devices in the syslog but J-Pilot refused to talk to the Pilot.
Permissions!
Yes it appears that I the lowely user do not have the permission to access these devices. Which is a problem because if you change permissions on the devices while they exist - those permissions get wiped when the pilot stops syncing because Linux actually deletes the devices.
What to do?
Well it turns out that this whole thing is now controlled by udev rules. I found this Guide to writing udev rules that helped me sort it out. I basically added a MODE=”0777″ to the auto created devices and there was rejoicing thru the land.
By now you’re probably begining to think that I stopped watching movies - that’s partially true. I’ve been stuck in the middle of a couple (which I absolutely hate) thanks in large part to three things.
1. The Spurs - they continue to win - I continue to watch. This eats into a lot of my tv time.
2. Seaon Finalie land - yes thanks to things like a 2hr finish for CSI I’m a little back logged
3. Hobby time - I’ve actually broken away from the tv to work on some hobby stuff.
Anyway enough about me - let’s talk about “Cube” - which I could have sworn was called “The Cube” which was annoying since IMDB didn’t show me the movie when I put the “The” in there but did when I didn’t.
This is apparantly in that “Cult Movie” status. Which is completely understandable. You’ve probably never heard of it where as I saw it for the first time about six years ago on Sci Fi channel. It’s haunted me a little ever since - and thanks to the joys of Netflix it came to darken my DVD player. For those of you who are gluttons for movie obscurity - there is both a sequel (Cube 2:Hybercube) and a prequel (Cube Zero). I haven’t seen either - and it is incredibly unlikely that I will based on the limited reading I did on IMDB.
Since you probably haven’t seen it - short summary is in order - People are trapped in these rooms. Some of safe and some are trapped with wires or flame throwers. People meet up and form a group to try and find a way to escape. The people are all complete strangers and they come from all walks of life. If you want to have fun place bets as soon as you are introduced to characters on who lives and who dies.
The easiest way to think about this film - is if they made Sci-Fi plays - this would be it :) The director does a great job of taking a 16′x16′x16′ space and making it seem infinite by some lame lighting changes and a lot of cutting in the editing room. Which believe me I totally approve of. One hint - a lot of people die.
For a sci-fi film the actors do a passable job of acting - this is actually pretty impressive when you consider that most of them didn’t go on to much of a career - exceptions being one ended up on The Dead Zone and the other on Stargate:Atlantis - which means they apparently liked the whole sci-fi thing.
The thing that makes this movie really great is that most of it is completely character driven. You slowly get to find out about their backgrounds and watch them crumble as they try to escape.
The thing that really stuck with me even from the first time I saw it was an argument the characters have about why they are in the Cube in the first place. None of them remember getting there. And they can’t think of why they are there. There is the theory of aliens, or the government or an evil genius.
Then Worth (one of the characters in the movie) has his theory - that there is no conspiracy. That the whole thing was built by people who were just doing their jobs - not thinking about what their part in all of it was. That there was no master planner. This is just something that happened. Something that started with one purpose or another and became the Cube. It would keep happening because to stop it would basically be admitting that it was wrong in the first place - and that would be a greater crime to a beauracy than the act of killing people.
You will have to see the film to know which answer the write chose. But the reason why this always stuck with me is because it fits with Occam’s Razor “when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better.” Which I find I tend to follow where possible. Worth’s explanation is extreme but it follows the pattern of a lot of oddities I see in the real world - it’s not that people set out to be evil - more that they made a choice and it had unintended consiquences that could be perceived as evil or malicious.
And driving in to work today I was listening to NPR talk about the Guantamino Bay detainees - and I realized that is a perfect example. Here are a bunch of people some who may be terrorists and some who were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time who are being held in secret off the coast of the US. If the government had a great case against them you know that they would have brought them to trial, but to release them at this point would basically be admitting that they probably shouldn’t have held them in the first place. This is a perfect parallel to the idea Worth talks about.
So in the end - I still liked the movie even watching it a second time knowing how it was going to play out.
Bottom line: If you like sci-fi and can handle watching the same few characters for and hour and a half while you try to collect money based on the order they die - go ahead and check it out. If you prefer your sci with more space craft or lazer pistols look else where. If you want simple and unambiguoues - or you only have time for the oscar worthy drama - keep moving along.
p.s. Oh and I so called it that the writers were Canadian - who says “Free Clinic Doctor” and they just had to squeeze in a lot of french didn’t they :P
Red Hat to Open-Source Netscape Directory
What can I say? I’m excited. I played with Open LDAP - it was painful. I worked with eDirectory - it was awesome - but way outside my budget for use anywhere outside a corporate deployment. I’m hoping this helps push the directory service stuff into more applications.
I actually think done right Directory services can be incredible cool as a tool for gluing applications together. The only problem is that although LDAP is a “standard” my limited experience makes it seem like it has even more warts than dealing with “standard” SQL.
If this is easy to setup and administrate - it may end up in my permanent tool kit.
Ok the Mac OS X/Windows users out there will have no sympathy or understanding of that statement - but hey that’s why I run Linux right. I like figuring stuff. I like figuring stuff out so much that not only do I run Debian - but I run Debian unstable.
So several months ago I got a snazzy new laptop - it’s an HP Pavilion zv5000. It replaced my ageing Dell. Overall this thing has been a huge improvement over my old laptop -with two minor acceptions:
1. The dock is annoying - it donesn’t have a dedicated network mac id - so I have to resort to other trickery to detect I’m in a dock and they put a huge speaker on it that blocks the disk light :(
2. I have no sound.
Ok the second one is probably more my fault that anything. Basically I’ve been trying to use the Alsa sound system. Until today if I wanted sound under Linux I had to:
1. Become Root
2. Run alsaconfig
3. Fix the volume setting
4. Chmod a bunch of devices so I can control volume as a normal user
5. run my apps
I had to do the above every time I rebooted. That was so annoying I usually just let my office mate blast his stereo.
I had enough today - since I was playing with an application that played audio as part of it’s demo.
I found out that a big part of my problem is that when I went to 2.6 kernel I never setup a modprobe.conf which means a lot of my modules weren’t loading properly. Forunately there’s a program for this called generate-modprobe.conf. Which I had but it was stored as documentation not as an executable. I ran it - and after a little while I managed to get it to run the sound modules and the nVidia driver in dual head mode - one issue left.
I added a new catch-all script called Startup.sh which will handle all the startup stuff - like chmod’ing devices for my normal account
I run Gnome. It comes with a little widget to handle volume control. This is sort of important because I need to be able to easily mute the sound when I get a call. The widget totally didn’t work. I was left controlling volume from an ncurses alsa-mixer - which I can tell you sucks.
I found a nice reference on a sight in Hong Kong. Some parts were in Chinese and parts were in English. In the thread I found instructions to add:
ii alsa-base 1.0.8-6 ALSA driver configuration files
ii alsa-utils 1.0.8-3 ALSA utilities
ii gamix 1.99.p14.debia Graphical sound mixer for ALSA
ii libasound2 1.0.8-2 ALSA library
ii libasound2-dev 1.0.8-2 ALSA library development files
ii libesd-alsa0 0.2.35-2 Enlightened Sound Daemon (ALSA) - Shared lib
I did that and viola - the widget works!
Ok so that may seem like a lot of work - and even possible a pain. And it is - but now that it works I’m done - and I feel like I learned something :)
The joy of puffy tacos! YEA 4 Henry’s!
“Antibiotic” Beer Gave Ancient Africans Health Buzz
Ok so I won’t be making this kind of beer - but it is still good to know that an entire people were able to be healthier thanks to beer.
Favorite paragraph:
Armelagos said the Egyptians used beer as a gum-disease treatment, a dressing for wounds, and even an anal fumigant—a vaporborne pesticide to treat diseases of the anus. The anthropologist also believes the tetracycline protected the Nubians from bone infections, as all the bones he examined are infection free.
This release has some code clean up. It also adds a new feature. Ddman got me his verison of the forwarding code. I’ve merged this in and added some tweaks.
Basically you can now set an option to have any mail that is sent to your gateway that would be rejected automatically forwared to your administrator. This is handy in those cases where you try to send in a post from an account you haven’t authorized (This got me when Cingular changed my att.com email account over). The cool part is that it also forwards all attachments. If you send in pictures they will get forwarded along.
The system also handles cases where the email is blank better.
Fiunally, if you got a message from an invalid user there was a risk that you could lose mail if your cron job didn’t run often enough. Now it continues to process even if there is a message from an invalid sender.
There is a risk that if someone sends you a virus or what not that it will be bounced along happily - but that’s why you can turn it off :).
Enjoy!
P.s. if anyone knows any good tools to work with 3gp files under linux (unstable debian) I would love to hear about it. I would like to be able to make auto thumbnails for movies from my phone as well.
Original Source is here WP-Mail 0.312
Basically just to give you an idea of what a Linux dork I am - I got thefor MythTV (which I haven’t had the time to get up and running) because it is highly recommended and supported by a huge community. Well I have a bunch of VHS tapes of home movies and what not that I would like to have on DVD. It didn’t even occur to me that not only would the card work under windows - that windows is the only offically supported os from the manufacturer - which is like DUH - but it took me a while to figure this out since I’m not used to doing anything under windows besides playing games, surfing, and programming my Replay TV.
So I dusted off a VCR and got it all hooked up (SVideo no less). I opened a drawer and picked up the first tape - WTF ? Why is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in here - where are all my home movies. You see I used to be a video tape fiend - I have over 500 of them in my house. In an attempt to fight off my inate pack rattishness I threw them almost all out. Except for the personal stuff. So I’m standing there in my lab thinking - “Oh my god - I threw out all my home movies!” Turns out they were in a box tucked away so it’s all good.
A couple of things about this process -
1. Get a good VCR - I found one in the stack that had S-Video out - that’s all the better
2. Get a good head cleaner - I need to do this
3. Get ready to spend some time - capture hapens in real time (meaning it takes a long time to convert)
4. Once you’re done - get a good editing/DVD layout prog - because you’re going to need that too - I’m a big fan of Vegas from Sony.
The biggest problem for me is that a number of the tapes have valuable content on them (c.f. A couple of very geeky new years parties) mixed in with random movies and recorded television. So most of my time has been spent figuring out what is on the tape and setting it up to capture.
I had my oddest experience to date last night. I found this news report. They were talking about the economy and Alan Greenspan. I thought it was a very odd thing to have recorded - I didn’t really get into economics until college (That’s actually what my degree is in) Then in the middle of the story - they shift to “And now lets here from a local economist” - and up pops my dad. He was teaching a class (He was an Economics professor (among other things) at a small Catholic college in Indiana). They interviewed him about what he thought about Greenspan’s Monetary policy. This was all part of the build up to the first Gulf War.
My dad died in Jan. 8th, 1999. In books and movies, they always have a character talk about how they can’t remember what their dead realative looks like anymore. Kind of the idea that over time they just get fuzzy as part of letting go and moving on. I don’t know if it’s just because I have picutres or what - but he’s never faded from my mind in a visual sense. That’s what made this so odd. I realized as I listened to him talk to the reported that what had become fuzzy was how he sounded. From time to time I catch me or my brother saying things that he either did say or would have said - but his voice was his own.
And here looking at this 30 second clip I remembered all that. And realized that not only did he miss the rocket ship that has been my company’s rise to the top of the heap (We got funding on Dec 28 1998), but that now he’ll miss my wedding in April. Which is one of those things I’ve always known but never really thought about because for most of my life the idea of getting married has been a hazy thing at best. So although I have been transferring over 3 hours of footage of his funeral in Indiana and at Arlington National cememtery, it wasn’t as affecting to me emotionally as watching my dad talk about the economic levers Greenspan has at his disposal to control the flow of money in the economy.
Ok I’m a futurama fan, and I admit I have a soft spot for mini-itx (Mine is called beastie and has mostly served as our road computer when we needed one)
Here’s a fan who did a lot more than I ever did with my mini-itx.
