The Big Picture

Taking care of the day-to-day minutae you can sometimes lose track of the bigger things you should be taking care of. I need to:

1) Clean up the apartment. Not just for tidiness and cleanliness, but to get rid of all the old crap that I no longer need and just takes up space now. I took one stab at this earlier and got rid of a lot of stuff, but there’s plenty more lurking in the closets and desk drawers still.

2) Get a vehicle. I haven’t needed one recently and still really don’t, but the mobility will make the other steps easier. Something used, so I don’t care if I ding it up a bit in my inexperience, but not so old that it’ll have maintenance problems. Preferably a four-door sedan for enough room and comfort for friends.

3) Get a house. Now that I have a bit saved up, there’s not much sense in continuing to dump rent into somebody else’s pocket. I don’t need something huge and wouldn’t be able to take care of it anyway; something with a small yard and three bedrooms (mine, guest, and office), or two bedrooms and a basement would be sufficient. I can probably pay it off in 10 to 15 years and be well-prepared for retirement down the road.

4) Unleash my robotic shock troops and corner the world energy markets. Hey, they’re getting bored.

Review: Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I don’t drink. I’ve never done drugs. You could probably call me ‘straightedge’, though I don’t really subscribe to any specific philosophy. So what in the world am I doing watching a movie that’s essentially one long acid trip?

Well, curiosity about the experience, partly. If it’s not something you can experience for yourself, maybe it can at least be portrayed well enough that you can get a sense of what it’s like. We’re all familiar with the major drug cliches, but those alone don’t really give you any idea what it would really be like.

The movie follows the adventures of Raoul Duke (a character mostly based on Hunter Thompson himself, played by Johnny Depp), and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), who are on assignment to write about a motorcross race and a drug enforcement agency convention in Las Vegas. Their assignment is largely irrelevant though, as they spend almost all of their time doing everything else but. In fact there isn’t really much of a plot at all apart from “get wasted, do crazy things.”

It’s all about their experiences. From seeing imaginary bats, to two completely wrecked hotel rooms, to a nonsensical cover story given to a maid, to threats with knives, to an attempt to ditch a far-too-young missionary girl Gonzo picked up, to a music-induced suicide attempt, to a freaked-out hitchhiker they pick up, all while in a distorted frame of mind after consuming every illicit substance known to man, no depth or depravity is left unplumbed. Many of the usual cliches are here, but they don’t feel artificial or forced at all. Although their behaviour is deranged to us as observers, it makes a kind of sense to them in their own little separate universe. Duke’s treatment of people is largely guided by his paranoia, fuelled by his fear of the drug’s effects and the reactions of his fellow partaker Dr. Gonzo.

This is hardly a pro-drug movie, either. Though there is much amusement to be found in their little escapades, there is a large degree of desperation and revulsion to it too. Why would they do this to themselves, getting into these dire straits that any sane person would easily avoid, one wonders. The answer in their case is the primary ‘meaning’ you might get from this movie; their adventures take place as the 70s are arriving and the freedom and idealism of the 60s has died and been replaced by disco and ‘family’ casinos. They’re out of place, and their retreats into drugs are their attempt to escape and recapture that magic of the 60s, except that they lack an ultimate goal to reach. The drugs are the natural gateway back to the 60s, but without some sense of purpose to it and nothing to strive for they only compound their problems and alienate themselves even further, and that is their central tragedy.

I wasn’t there back then of course, and I still can’t feel it for myself, but I think I now understand it slightly better than I did before. If you’re looking for a meaningful plot and complex, heroic characters, you certainly won’t find them here. If you’re looking for a new experience and a bit of reflection though, you won’t be disappointed.

(I don’t know if I’ll do more reviews; I’m just experimenting with this one.)

Yet Another Stupid Webcam

(Edit: This has been abandoned for now since I never really got it working as well as I’d liked.)

What am I doing in the office on a Sunday?

Not working, actually. Instead I’ve been setting up a webcam in my office. The view is not of the office itself, which would be extremely vain and boring, but of the Kensington area across the river. You’d be able to see where I live were it not for the apartment towers being in the way.

I still have to prettify the interface, but for now you can just select the last file listed in the folder. There is no specific refresh time on it; it’s set up to update whenever the image changes by a certain amount. I still have to experiment with what that threshold should be a bit, so it might not update often enough or too often for your liking for now.

Read on only if you’re curious about the technical details.
Continue reading “Yet Another Stupid Webcam”

Say Hello To My Little Friend

The newest member of my little family, ‘ebotona’:

It’s an iBook G4, and although I’ve occasionally used Macs before, this is the first one I’ve actually ever owned. Why an iBook? Well, I always like to have something new to tinker with. My knowledge about Macs is about 10 years out of date, so it couldn’t hurt to get back up to speed on them, especially since I may get nailed with doing our OSX client port at work. I don’t really need a new full-blown desktop system, but I could occasionally use a laptop, so the iBook fills both needs; it’ll fulfill my travelling requirements, and still give me something new to fiddle with when at home.

So what was the first thing I did? Wipe OSX off and install Linux, of course… :-)
Continue reading “Say Hello To My Little Friend”

RFC on WTF RSS IGF

I recently tried out an RSS aggregator extension for my browser, and I have to say, I’m not really impressed so far. It *works*, but I find the following a bit annoying:

1) Inconsistent context. Some sites put the whole damn article in the RSS entries, some only put the first ‘x’ number of words.
2) Lack of comment information. Often I’m interested in seeing any new comments on older entries, but the RSS file doesn’t even tell me how many comments there are so I can’t tell if there are any new ones
3) Inconsistent HTML usage. Some sites put HTML within the RSS entry, but some don’t, which is important on sites where things like accompanying images are important to the entry.

As a result I usually wind up visiting the site manually anyway to get the proper layout, images, comments, etc., so checking in the RSS aggregator first didn’t really do any good.

I can see one area in which RSS would be quite useful, when you want to check large numbers of infrequently-updated sites for new entries without having to visit every single one. It just doesn’t do much to help me out. It sounds great in theory, so maybe it’s just the implementations and usage of it that’s not up to snuff yet.

Spank It

To protect FIDO, we always made sure that there was an engineer standing just a few paces from the rover who was responsible for making sure the rover never did anything that would cause it to damage itself. This was quite often Terry Huntsberger, one of the principals on the FIDO project. […] If Terry noticed something dangerous about to happen, he would hit a red button on the back of the rover that would cause the rover to immediately stop moving. This was called “spanking” the rover, and it happened VERY rarely. Still, I must admit that it was comforting to me to know that Terry was always out there, watching every motion of the rover. If we made a mistake, we might feel pretty stupid about it, but Terry would stop us before it was too late.

It’s hard to mentally adjust to the fact that there isn’t anyone standing behind Spirit wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, ready to spank the rover if we do anything wrong.

(from a journal at NASA)

Speaking of Books…

I figured I’d put my new card to good use and get some other books I need at the Chapters online shop, since some of them are hard to find in the local stores. It was however, largely futile; most of the titles I was looking for were out of stock or ‘temporarily unavailable.’ Well, nuts.

Fortunately, Amazon recently opened up a Canadian branch of their online store, and after a quick check there all of them were available, though a few were in the ‘1-3’ week timeframe. A lot of them were cheaper than at Chapters even after the club discount. Hurray! But them I remembered how I got screwed around by Amazon before… The last time I ordered from them, they claimed it would ship in 1-2 weeks. After three weeks of waiting, I finally got an e-mail from them saying that they were sorry it was late but they were still working on it. A couple weeks after that, another notice arrived saying that they’d given up and cancelled the order. Was it just a really hard-to-get book? Not really, it was a fairly recent release and I then went and ordered the same book from Chapters and it was in my hands three days later.

There was also something suspicious about the shipping times listed. I had a book set aside in my ‘saved items’ section and it was listed as being available in 2-4 days. I was tempted to add it to the list, but upon clicking it for details, the detail page listed the shipping time as 1-4 weeks! A glitch in the system? Or was it deliberately misrepresenting the shipping time of a book to try and tempt me into picking it…

So, I’m not entirely sure I trust Amazon anymore. But then I can’t even order many of these titles from Chapters. So, for now I’ve gone ahead and placed the order through Amazon. This will be their second chance to either redeem themselves or confirm just how lousy they might be…

Another Small Defeat

Today I went to buy some books at the Chapters location in Chinook, and I finally gave in and got one of their ‘club’ cards. As a rule I generally don’t join these clubs, for a variety of reasons. I hate the false sense of familiarity they try to foster when the cashier is required to refer to you by name; I don’t like attempts to manipulate my buying habits through their data-mined profiles; and I like to exercise the freedom not to participate. It is a choice, after all, so why be surprised that not everyone chooses the same way?

So why did I cave in to Chapters then? Because programming books are freaking expensive. Ten cents off a bottle of water is one thing; $15 off of a $70 design patterns book is another. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology…

I Am A Weak, Weak Man

Despite all of my previous complaining, I have bought and am now installing Gates of Discord.

Why? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Because of those previously mentioned troubles, getting a group nowadays can be fairly tough. When the opportunity to get into a good group does arise though, I don’t want “oh, but you don’t have the latest expansion pack…” to be yet another factor that could possibly keep me from joining up.

Damn, Sony’s got a good racket running here…

Family?

Well, it finally happened. I got up early, prepared for the day, walked to the office, and now I’m sitting here by myself because I forgot it’s a freaking statutory holiday.

I’d have myself tested for Alzheimer’s, but I’d forget to go pick up the results…

(Though to be fair it’s ‘Family Day’, one of those artificial holidays that exists only so the province meets the minimum federal holiday requirements. It’s not exactly much cause for celebration.)

Vandalism, Sort Of

While walking home across the LRT bridge, I noticed some bootprints and bike tracks. Not too surprising, except that they were down in the snow on top of the Bow river. The ice doesn’t really get that thick, what kind of idiot would risk themselves on that, I wondered.

Then I noticed where the tracks were leading. A bit farther down, some words had been stomped into the snow covering the ice. In the dim light I couldn’t make out what it actually said, but I did recognize the now-cliche ‘anarchy’ circled-A.

Yes, somebody actually risked life and limb to let us all know just how 3DGY they are…

In other news, I actually got my first credit card fraud check call today, to verify a recent transaction. I was so surprised by their call on a weekend and to the office that I probably sounded completely suspicious and the police are on their way right now. Hey, is that a siren…

This post has also made me realize that I have no idea how to do accented characters in X applications. Being a filthy Westerner I’ve never really needed to use them before. I’ll have to look into it…

Schadenfreude

I’m sure by now everyone and their dog has heard about the Windows NT/2K source code being leaked, and I have to say, I feel a bit sorry for them.

Now before you bite my head off, no, I’m not going soft on them. Windows still sucks technically, their business practices are still shady, and I still try to avoid buying from them when I can. It’s still their code though, and it’s their right to control it. By application of The Golden Rule, I can’t condone something happening to them that I wouldn’t want to happen to myself. If our company code ever got leaked, I’d probably crawl under a rock and die of embarrassment at having all of my coding sins exposed to the world.

Now that it’s out though, will I look at it? Hell no, that code is poison to any professional programmer. The last thing I need is Microsoft out to ruin my professional career just because there’s even the slightest suspicion I may have glanced at it, or to have any future contributions to open source projects subject to suspicion of being tainted knowledge. Just look at what SCO’s up to to see where that leads.

(Han Shot First)

Yay, the first Star Wars trilogy is finally slated to be released on DVD later this year. About damn time. There’s been a lot of speculation about why it’s been delayed so long; the official party line is that they just didn’t have time to work on it while the new movies were in production, but it’s also entirely possible Lucas just wanted to keep building and building anticipation in order to milk the initial release for as much money as possible. Whatever, it’ll be irrelevant soon enough.

The set will be the Special Editions of the movies, but I’m not really enough of a purist to care *too* much. The ultra-purists probably already have the bootleg DVDs/rips going around anyway.

The Dark Side Of The Net

You learn an awful lot when you run your own site, and it’s mostly driven by what people try to do to you. This week’s lesson was about ‘dark crawlers,’ web spiders that don’t play by the rules.

Any program that crawls the web for information (mostly search engines), is supposed to follow the robots exclusion standard kept in the robots.txt file. Not every part of a web site is suitable for crawling — for example, the /cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi… links on my site would just contain redundant information already in the main articles and would place extra load on the server — so you use that file to tell crawlers which parts of your site not to bother loading. You can also use it to stop crawlers that are behaving in ways you don’t like (e.g., polling too often) based on a unique part of their user agent name.

Adherence to that standard is entirely voluntary though, and some crawlers ignore it entirely. Yesterday I noticed a large number of hits coming from two class-C subnets. Although they appeared to be regular web browsers by their user agents (one Mac, one Windows), they were very rapidly working their way through every article on the site, in numerical order. A Google check on the IP address range quickly revealed that they were part of a company called ‘Web Content International’ which is apparently notorious for this kind of dark crawling.

A couple of new firewall rules to drop packets from them stopped their crawling, but then my kernel logs were getting flooded with firewall intrusion notices. They were apparently content to sit there retrying every few seconds for however long it took to get back in. Allowing them back in and having Apache return a 403 Forbidden page to requests from their address ranges instead seemed to finally make them stop.

Is that kind of crawling really that bad? Crawling is a natural web activity now, the site is public information, and these guys probably don’t intend any harm, so it doesn’t seem *too* bad. There are worse offenders out there too, such as dark crawlers that specifically go into areas marked as ‘Disallowed’ in robots.txt even if they weren’t part of the original crawl, hoping to find juicy details like e-mail addresses to spam. Still, if they want to crawl they should be open about admitting they’re doing so by following the robot standards. If they’re going to be sneaky about getting my data, I’m perfectly within my rights in being sneaky in denying it to them.