-- William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties
Rather than bothering to come up with my own opinion, I'll just link to the sfgate.com article deriding all this Janet Jackson OMG WON'T SUMONE THINK OF TEH CHKLREN?!? nonsense.
Recently someone complained about how often American media uses the word "tragedy" to describe things that aren't.
Janet Jackson's rancid boob on the telly for half a moment isn't a tragedy.
How many Americans have died in this most recent invasion of Iraq? How many Iraqis were killed for no good goddamn reason?
We just can't be fucked to care until its in our face, on fire, and all 110 stories of it are collapsing.
If you die when there's no one watching
and your ratings drop and you're forgotten
If they kill you on their TV
You're a martyr and a lamb of God
So Microsoft Research has released the source to Allegiance, which was a great game. It combined aspects of RTS and typical space sims to form something that was altogether new.
The idea behind the game is that each team has a Commander who decides what to build, where to mine, and when and where to attack.
All the other players control space craft such as miners, bombers, fighters, and cap ships. Each class of ship requires a certain number of players to control: eg, a bomber requires one pilot and two turreters (if I remember right), and a cap ship requires upwards of half a dozen players.
The high-volume of players required to have an actual game is probably what really caused Allegiance to not work out in the long run. But it was a lot of fun.
Apparently if you actually check out the license, it appears that any derivative works are owned by Microsoft. Which is less than surprising though still sort of sad. :-)
Been looking for this for ages: virtual desktops for OS X.
Or I should say, decent virts for OS X.
Also: free.
Application seems happily configurable, hasn't crashed or caused my machine to start spurting blood in my face like some sort of horrible Hell clam.
This is always a plus.
The only major problem concerns more how OS X deals with applications than the virt manager itself, and really, it only has to do with applications that allow hotkeying to windows (eg, Terminal.app). You're going to be sharing hotkey space throughout all the virts.
Not a huge issue, mind you, but total segmentation of desktops is nice.
I haven't tested to see how well it works with X11, as I don't use X11 for anything since Terminal stopped sucking boatloads of poor refugees into its gaping maw of doom.
Doom.
update: rjbs is complaining about many crashes. Haven't happened here. I have noticed that it doesn't work so well with hidden applications, though. If you hide an app in one virt, it tends to show up in another.
I suppose I don't just want virtual workspaces, but actual desktops. I expect that requires purchasing something or other.
rjbs pointed this one out last week sometime.
Mostly I suspect only us UNIX to OS X converts will care (though solios seems to be enjoying it quite a bit), but Quicksilver is a nice little command launcher.
Tired of mousing around to open apps or bookmarks, or whatever? Miss the good old days of tab completion? Too damn lazy to use ``open'' from Terminal?
Well, QS is for you. command-space (or whatever you tell it to), type in the first couple letters of what you want, hit enter.
I don't even see the Dock anymore.
Ever seen Trekkies? It's a documentary about Star Trek fanatics. In it, there's this dentist whose practice is made up with all sorts of ST kit. They wear Star Fleet uniforms. I thought it was the most horrible thing I'd ever seen.
Like letting Dr Billy Bob Joe Donny operate on your brain, only with toy phasers and tricorders along with their stethoscopes.
This is worse. While I'm all about finding new ways to reach kids to make them interested in learning, Jesus fuck, those kids are never going to have normal social interactions. Ever.
Linkwhored from mdxi.
Nothing new here, for those of us who follow Gibson and his work, but a relatively interesting read anyway.
It's not like Rhode Island really matters, but it's good to see this crap get thrown out.
I think my favorite part is where he didn't even read the entire bill before submitting it.
Also, "Everything is terror now. That thing where you go outside and say how fucked up it is that there's all these homeless people, and abused, obese citizens sucking down their daily load of crap TV, suckling at the teat of Mother Distraction so they don't have to look at how inane, trite and horrible their own life has become", that thing. That's terror now.
Trying to find a better way to live is terror.
When your rulers want nothing more than for you to be static, living in fear, that's the final wake-up call.
Couldn't remember what the hell sea animal is that switches shells when it outgrows its current one, or finds a pretty one with better plumbing and hardwood floors.
Engler, of course, knew it was the hermit crab. A quick google search confirmed it, I got the stupid analogy I needed for this latest iteration of system, and I discovered a few amusing facts.
The foremost of these is that when a more aggressive crab comes across another, occupied shell it wants, they fight for it.
Not sure why this wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise, but dude.
Shelljacking.
For those of you with enough cash to get a new PowerBook, and hate touchpads, MacMice.com brings you the AL mouse. Because, really, what's another 40 bucks?
Via Danelope.
I want this.
Also, keep in mind that the Invader Zim DVD set is out May 11th. So much yay.
Via binary.
Yeah, this brings back some memories.
Hell, I bought my second piece of computer equipment (a 14.4 modem!) off one of the local BBS sysops (Dreamsomething or other), and they ran Renegade.
I remember staying up all night playing LoRD and Tradewars (and Pimpwars), or playing X-COM until I had to go to school (rinse, wash, repeat all week).
My first piece of kit was for my parent's 486: A 4meg RAM chip.
$120. For four megs of RAM.
Yeah, man, the bad old days were pretty bad.
This is just fucking astounding.
I can't wait until prisons in the U.S. get privatized and corporations start trying this shit on for size...
So a while back mdxi and solios decided to do a comic strip based on our zany antics in #tildedot.
The latest strip, which involves me bitching about not knowing how to code, apparently amused the CDBI list somewhat.
It's pure wankery, I realize, but it keeps us amused, out of trouble, and increases your stamina in bed.
That last bit is only true if you're snorting fiberglass.
OldVersion.com, a repository of old versions of common software.
Can't count the times I've heard someone bitch about needing a certain version of $thing to test @stuff with.
[via aab]
This article from Stanford details some more complex attacks against their own UNIX machines. Apparently a concerted effort, as well.
Many good links in this one (some of which I've seen before, others not).
Wildly shifting foreign policy. Sending eighteen year olds to fight men trained by fifty year olds fifteen years ago. Using empty moral justifications for pointless violence.
I'm so tired of this bullshit. Isn't everyone else?
Thank the gods FilePile is back up. I was actually being productive this week.
So you go to the coffee shop with your brand new PowerBook. This gets you teh looks as it is, because it's a sexy machine. And the girls, they like the sexy machines.
Then you bust it open, with the true transparent terminals running BackLight and MatrixGL and all of a sudden you gotta beat 'em off with barrels of monkeys.
Or anyway, that's what's should happen. In any sane world.
"Each and every one of the products we build isn't just an application; it's also an extensible piece of software," Ballmer said. "The cheapest piece of code is one I don't have to write myself but one I already have and can reuse and repurpose."
That sounds really very familiar...
Justice Must Be Seen To Be Done.
If you haven't book-marked The Agonist I highly recommend it.
Scholars plan to espouse merits of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'
It's well-known I'm a big Buffy fan, but these sort of things are kind of silly. That college course for Matrix for instance.
How meta can you get?
On the other hand, anything that gets Joss Whedon more attention is fine with me. Maybe someone who won't cancel his shows will pick him up.
Perl6 Operator Periodic Table. Pretty awesome. I'll have to see if I can't get one of the pre-press guys to print me out a copy.
CVL: Concurrent Versions Librarian.
Looks relatively nifty.
After I get lever (Factory dev box) back up, I'll have to play with it some.
Non-Vulnerability Security Information for woody
Spammed on deb-sec, and as someone mentioned there: The link for that is unfortunately hidden down at the bottom of the security page, which is why I mention it. Many humans whinging on about "OMG ITS INSCUER!"
(Of course, for those of us using non-Debian packages, that's uh, true.)
Here's an excerpt of the new book.
A few images from it as well, via Lilja's Library.
Found off the Dark Tower orkut community: Song of Susannah review.
Assuages some of the fears I was having about King writing himself into the story, and reminds me I need to add June 8th to iCal. :)
Also, Amazon's "Best Value"?
Buy Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, Book 6) and get The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equator... at an additional 5% off Amazon.com's everyday low price.
Bloody odd, that.
I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't link to the official Dark Tower site. :)
Oddly, I've never seen TorgoX talk about that in #perl, and he's there almost every day.
[link via coraline, who DID talk about it in #perl]
<kitten> Do you have anything to do with this?
<kitten> I think you do.
Tutorial: Creating an OpenBSD Package
Andrew asked about this so he could easily install OpenVPN on multiple OBSD boxes, and mjc spammed that. Looks trivial.
Huh. Ian Murdock has a weblog.
17:15 < john> who's that?
17:16 <@bda> DebIAN.
17:16 < mdxi> married to DEBian
17:16 < john> oh that Ian Murdock
17:16 < john> :P
Pretty nuts no one mentioned this fact to me, seeing as his archives go back a year.
Bloody duh.
I hate when people break off talking to me, or pull out of a conversation, to answer a phone call.
I especially hate when they don't even bother excusing themselves.
19:17 <@semi> debian can't compete with gentoo because they have different
goals - one wants to be a productive distro and the other wants
to be bsd.
19:19 <@bda> Like a little girl wanting to grow up to be a princess.
Gentoo does some good work. But that page is pretty freakin' great. :)
Americans step up to the plate and prove you wrong.
I want to set you all on fire.
< bda> alsdkjfla;sdjf;lajsdkf
< rjbs> I'm surprised they let that photo leak.
< rjbs> Usually, candidates don't like their secret identities to be known
[via adamk]
If you have not read Jennifer Government, I highly recommend doing so now, just so you're ready...
[via porkchop]
[via ralfiboy]
09:38 < mdxi> i agree with the tutorials bit
09:38 < mdxi> the rest is clearly from some bizarro world where software is "finished" and "ships"
09:39 < mdxi> probably involving C++ and Windows
A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys is awesomely incorrect on almost every point.
If it were called "A Girl's Guide to Fucking Losers", I would care much less.
[via rjbs]
If you only see one fabumazing piece of Finnish theatre this year, make sure it's Star Wreck.
You must watch the trailer.
[via kitten]
Pete has been spamming at me to read the Fire and Ice series for a while now, and I suspect I'll eventually get around to it.
Nothing that Martin says in the FAQ is anything I haven't heard before, but repetition enforces understanding, and might eventually breed habit...
[via Pete, whose domain I will never be able to spell, or pronounce.]
The Secret Source of Google's Power.
A pretty awesome article about the tech google uses to do what google does.
I wish I had the big shiny toys, and the brain to use 'em.
While I may not be an engineer, I suspect this will be very useful in the coming weeks.
[via kitten]
Surely everyone but me has been subjected to the squirrely wrath, but whatever.
Most of the toons are extremely amusing, and quite a few made me laugh aloud.
Goddamn squirrels.
Here's some Pumpcon 2004 shots. If you missed it, you suck.
And here's lots of pictures of Steve and Keri's wedding.
An entertaining, informative piece on why the cities should tell everyone else to fuck off. While it obviously wouldn't actually work, I still envision things like Anhk-Morpork (Discworld) or Midgard (FF7).
[via dengler]
< Base10> Has anyone read the news about the human/animal hybrid?
< Base10> I for one welcome our new mutant bunny overlords!
I've been watching this Canuck scifi/drama called ReGenesis for a while now. The show focuses on a team of biotechs working for a ficticious entity called NORBAC, who deal with bio-terrorism and various other bio/disease-related issues. Great stories, awesome acting...
The series just ended, so I went to check out the imdb forums for news on a second season.
Pretty happy to see that a good majority of the music in the series, which I enjoyed, is available for download.
If you get a chance, you should definitely check out ReGenesis. It is awesome.
Lucky I got through it just as The Shield is set to start back up, too. I only have so much time to waste on media. :)
Is this a news article or a jerkcity comic?
GUI Administrator for MySQL. For those of you who... care, I guess.
I don't, particularly. I don't admin databases so much as install them, start them, and walk away. But hey, for you "DBAs"...
[via Lasar]
Debian drops various arch support.
15:14 <@bda> Dropping SPARC is weird.
15:15 < mdxi> not as weird as *keeping* itanium
My only remaining Linux machine will be gone by the end of the month, so I can't say I care much either way. Not that I have any SPARC hardware laying around that I'd put Linux on anyway.
Speaking of. I need to steal that damn E4500 out of Andrew's cube...
Modding your MacMini to lessen the likelihood of it getting knicked.
[via ejp and aab]
Shitty reporting strikes again... ZDNet "reports" on the whole del.icio.us/de.lirio.us thing, totally ignoring the fact that this Steve Mallet person did not write the software that runs his site.
Rik wrote Rubric, which is what de.lirio.us runs.
I don't know if this moron is representing himself as the author or what, but wow, ZDNet. Good job there.
Well, here's one acronym no one ever attributed to me.
[via dengler]
< mdxi> PC Magazine: Dell's new dual-core PC *rawks* because you've got a whole other processor to run your firewall/antivirus/malware stack!
One of the complaints we've heard from readers is that "protection" programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor's dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is "concentrating" on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.
I was complaining about nmap being so slow on unisog and Hughues mentioned amap. Pretty nice tool. Grabs banners a hell of a lot faster than nmap, but the output looks like it won't be a lot of fun to parse.
Just need to write a wrapper for it.
I'm working on grabbing banners from machines we see S/ACKs from. Pretty okay fun stuff, I suppose.
Professor explaining the kind of trouble a student is in after stealing his laptop.
Hell, I'd shit myself right then and there.
[via javaman]
And y'know, I didn't think it was that violent..
Hell, I think that site's design is more offensive than Sin City was.
...so going to hell.
What's funny is, Pete was explaining, at Sophy's birthday party, to this British guy, what teabagging [NSFW, I guess] was.
Well, not so much explaining as "Er, you don't know?" and the Brit, being only British and not a moron, figured it out soon after.
[via hhoffman]
Nice. Just another example of Google isn't exactly like most companies.
[via jcap]
George Lucas fears "Sith" will flop
"Lucas went on to say that it's okay if the movie fails, as he has more money than God, and can continue to make crap films with no thought to monetary concerns or issues of quality.
"In fact, his next film is "going to be a re-make of a huge crap I took twenty years ago after a drunken binge and filmed. It will have all the bells and whistles, ILM will replace the actual turds with CG and the water will be rendered using six thousand dual G5 XServes we're using liquid nitrogen to cool. Whoo-hee, you can get a serious high off huffin' that stuff!"
"ILM could not be reached for comment."
I've always hated trying to spec out rackmount equipment. But eh, it's necessary crap. And generally, it's expensive crap... but these new Tyan rackmounts seem like pretty decent boxes. Here's a review, via jcap. I need to replace crowley's current chassis with a pizzabox, and this looks like a good way to go about it.
Updated: Hmm... or one of these SuperMicro boxes.
Four hot-swap SATA drives is certainly nothing to sneer at.
But this is at least somewhat clever. And really rather well-written...
[via kitten]
Of course, this is also the show that uses GNOME as the workstation desktops, iirc.
Entertaining, regardless.
[via javaman]
Review of the Dell PowerConnect 2724.
I wouldn't mind having me a little gigabit switch action on my desk. There's currently rebate action going on as well.
Tempting.
Good review of Haunted, Palahniuk's latest book.
I agree with all the points of the review, save that I think the final story, Obsolete surpasses Guts on its own merits. I am biased towards sci-fi-ish things, however, so...
Damn, that was a good story.
[via danelope, and yes, ew "podcasting"]
Goddamn mdxi was talking about freshmeat.net last night so of course I spent 30 minutes going through the last few days entries. Here's the wheat. The chaff is still covered in shit somewhere.
- ddrescue
- Nano Hive
- console password manager
- remosync
- tunnelblick: OS X OpenVPN 2.0 widget
- tcpreplay
- Bicycle Repair Man Python "refactoring" browser... I don't pretend to actually understand what this is.
- fish: A friendly, new-user-oriented shell. CLI syntax highlighting!
Adam O'Donnell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script
Adam O'Donnell: The Cuneiform script has been accepted for inclusion in a future version of Unicode:
(883 characters) "Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform"
(103 characters) "Cuneiform Numbers"
Bryan Allen: ....That's fuckin' great.
Bryan Allen: I can't wait until Unicode supports hieroglyphics. That'll be really useful for all the ancient Egyptians I need to write localizations for.
Women's Brains Really Are Blown By Orgasms
Explains why the crazy ones always got off the best, I suppose.
[via ejp]
For anyone who missed it the first time around: Super awesome uekele playing in Central Park.
Way leet.
Furries descend on Philadelphia, populace curses when it is learned that they could have ordered a locust swarm instead.
Really disturbing article if you know nothing about furries, or fringe communities in general.
I won't be going outside unarmed... as draven points out, I can probably get away with claiming it was a hunting accident.
(Of course, the furry CSI ep -- one of the few I've managed to sit through -- was pretty close to that. But.)
[linkwhored by solios, javaman]
Deconstructing TPM, including a nice ripping-apart of some Doctorow nonsense.
My favorite part of this is that we've already been through it, from the FOSS perspective. When DRM first went into the Linux kernel, there was a huge uproar, and Linus essentially told everyone to shut the fuck up.
I guess the "circles" Doctorow travels in aren't hip to it. Or perhaps they missed that day's /. front page...
[via lasar]
Steve and Keri popped out a kid. Ava Elizabeth Mack.
So did jcap and Michiko. Joshua Kosei Cappeillo.
Adam finally got around to upping the pictures from his PhD defense. Fear it. (Adam insists that he and Sophy won't be having a kid any time soon. It'll be entertaining when they have triplets. Suckers.)
OnLamp has a biggish interview with many OBSD devs about thebig changes going into OpenBSD 3.8.
Lots of cool stuff!
(Of course everyone is mainly commenting on the inclusion of stat(1), haha.)
Ikaruka madness. This is freaking insane.
[via javaman]
So this is what Cronin has been working on.
Technical correspondent for the Revolution Dan Engler was heard to say:
From what I read if democratic elections were held in Saudia Arabia the biggest votes would go the the Saudi Nuke Israel Party followed by the Burn Israel Party and running a close third would be the Drive the Jews into the sea party.
Pity there's no "Drive the Jews to the Sea and Party" party. Jewish girls in bikinis. Mmmm.
Again, I'm all over democracy, within reason. But full-frontal democratic governments, reflecting the will a majority are fine in theory but in practice it's scary as hell. I'm sure that's why we've done away with it here in the United States.
[via bostik]
OpenBSD server hardware compatibility list
Pretty much anything without broken SCSI/RAID support is going to work. Which is uh, lots of machines. Including newer IBM servers they don't list (anything IDE or SATA-based obviously; the SCSI/RAID cards in most IBM boxes are unhappy).
Soldiers lose death benefits if they die wearing privately purchased armor..
How about we buy them some armor that doesn't suck?
Talk to your representatives, assuming it matters anymore.
[via timmy]
Forth-coming documentary on American imperialism.
Or, as Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex took to calling us, the American Empire.
Google's explanation of why it agreed to filter a portion of search results for their Chinese site.
It's sad, but I agree with it. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
And while you may not buy into the cowboy mentality, there are technological responses to oppressive, networked censorship.
* Add support for tunneling arbitrary network packets over a connection between an OpenSSH client and server via tun(4) virtual network interfaces. This allows the use of OpenSSH (4.3+) to create a true VPN between the client and server providing real network connectivity at layer 2 or 3. This feature is experimental and is currently supported on OpenBSD, Linux, NetBSD (IPv4 only) and FreeBSD. Other operating systems with tun/tap interface capability may be added in future portable OpenSSH releases. Please refer to the README.tun file in the source distribution for further details and usage examples.
Hmmm!
Take pictures of crap people are throwing away, spam it to an email addr, and they use the Google Maps API to point it out, along with the picture.
I think this is the first time anyone has done this. The tech to do it quite this simply certainly wasn't there before now.
[via digg]
A class at Bell Shoals Baptist Church embraces an alternate history that advocates the United States as a nation by Christians for Christians.
Aaagh. Agh.
Each class starts with a prayer, for guidance. For wisdom.
He says that, through prayer, George Washington made himself bulletproof during the French and Indian War.
?!?!;lkjasdf
Studies show, he says, that 97 percent of Americans believe in God. Only 3 percent are atheists.
"We've been robbed," Barton says. "Robbed by the 3 percent. The 3 percent has taken away our heritage. We've got to get involved and take it back."
Aaaaagh. Agh!
Engage bitching about homosexuals raising kids! About little kids in bed with gay men! About lesbians not being able to TEACH THEIR DAUGHTERS how to LOVE A MAN!
"Father," he begins as the students bow their heads, "We want to be clothed with grace. We want to be clothed with humility. . . . There is nothing in us that should be self-righteous, that should be judgmental."
Wrrrrrgh!
"There has always been debate over whether the government is a secular institution or a divine institution," he said.
Separation! Church! State!
This gov't as a divine institution?!
< mdxi> if non-conservatives would do something besides whine into their blogrolls, things might change
< mdxi> venting righteous indignation onto the cybernets is not political process, people
<@bda> http://www.obleek.com/iraq/
<@leguan> mhmm
<@Safari> what would I see if I had shockwave enabled?
<@bda> A map of Iraq with little red lights pinging every day where someone died.
<@bda> Broken down by country in the coalition.
<@bda> Note: Only coalition forces, not enemy or innocents.
<@Safari> I see, a flashy version of http://cryptome.org/mil-dead-iqw.htm?
<@bda> Aye.
<@bda> It's eery, though, because each little red light, and each click it makes, is someone dying.
<@bda> Lots of red lights, lots of clicking.
<@leguan> lots of dying
<@bda> Quite so.
[via rjbs]
Congress May Consider Manadotry ISP Snooping (and retention)
Soo... who wants to make the Tor network not suck?
[via digg]
No doubt everyone has seen this by now, but the White House Correspondents Dinner was a bit, oh, entertaining.
Stephen Colbert has balls of steel.
So amazing. The silence from the audience is more telling than their laughter. It's the same stuff he always says, but the President is y'know, five feet away.
The fake press conference skit was totally unnecessary and really took the bite out of the rest of it... possibly intential. Guess the man doesn't want to get disappeared. ;-)
(That link has some NSFW stuff on it, but nothing super bad.)
DCU Networking Society System Administrator Test 2003
A pretty decent test, I think. I didn't do too badly at it, though most of the Solaris stuff went right by me. The security questions were pretty amusing.
[via enkrypted]
AppleCared: My Life Inside Apple and AppleCare by Adam Knight
Server administration is a whole other animal, to me. It's face-to-face support with people you'll see again and again, and you can't become the bad guy to to many of them or your job is on the line. Technically, it sounds like a good deal. Practically, it's politics-laden, and I try my best to avoid jobs where there are politics involved in any significant amount because, frankly, I'm an egomaniacal perfectionist asshole and I don't work well with liberal arts school graduate wussies. I tend to make them cry. It's not intentional, it's just that they're idiots.
Genius!
Open Source Radio talks about NSA wiretaps.
Including some choice comments from William Gibson.
Social Engineering, the USB Way
You can always count on people's curiousity/stupidity/arrogance/greed. Didn't, like, Mitnick say that or something?
Nintendo Sends Shrub A Birthday Basket
DS Lite. Brain Age.
Maybe playing Brain Age will do some good...
[via vai]
Visor: Ever wish you had an FPS-style console for your OS? Well, here you go. Whenever you need a quick terminal regardless of what app is focused.
OS X I Use This: digg for applications. Pretty sweet. (Also, a Catalyst app.)
What he really needs to do is set up some Thermo-Nuclear War.
SMF Dependency Graph Generator
[via yuckf00]
Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays
Absolute genius. I love it. I've been reading Chandler all weekend, too, so it's especially fitting.
[via pete]
Y'know, if anyone was going to actually install NetBSD on a pigeon, it would be fucking Califorians.
Raed Jarrar's Story - An outrageous incident at JFK.
For all of those who would suggest he asked for it, by wearing a shirt with Arabic script on it... what country is this supposed to be? Sometimes I forget.
Windows PE 2.0: a tiny version of Windows for system maintenance
I have an FAI setup (with the LVM/RAID script update from Sam Villain, go go gadget root on RAID) at work which lets me get a Debian box up in less than two minutes, after a few seconds of configuration.
While I'm damn happy to not have to admin anything even remotely Windows-related anymore, it's nice to know that Microsoft hasn't forgotten about PE... just, y'know. As a peace of mind thing. In case the world goes all crazy and we decide to move from Postfix to Exchange.
Ha ha haa... oh. It hurts.
Interview with Scott Westerfeld
I'm a big fan of Westerfeld, post-Evolution's Darling, both the adult and teen books. Excellent stuff all around. He talks about the sequel to Peeps, some of the movie options for his books, and other fun stuff.
On his wife being a writer as well:
SW: My guess is that writers are like cats: it's better to have two, so they can play together instead of drinking too much and scratching the furniture.
Can't wait:
SW: Im working on an alternative history set in a world of advanced Edwardian biotechnology, during the first days of World War I. There are living airships and diesel-powered walkers, and the romantic leads are the son of Archduke Ferdinand and a cross-dressing young Scottish girl. Its called Leviathan and is, obviously, the first of a trilogy.
Biotech airships, WWI, tomboy Scottish chicks. Hot.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "life just went to hell."
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan ... Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."
Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much."
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."
Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.
"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.
"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."
"We're really hurting right now," he said.
Yet another "really frickin' sweet animation scifi movie thing": Renaissance.
Looks amazing, and also: Ian Holm. Word.
Finally. I sort of view Marissa as a twenty-something proto-Amy Hempel. And as I have said in the past, if you don't like Amy Hempel, you should reconsider some of your life choices because you may be a robot.
She's been MIA for years. Now she just needs to put up her old stuff...
Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera
Pretty freakin' sweet. As soon as eniak makes one, he should start charging for "rides".
[via digg]
NASA Cassini Images: Sunrise Over Saturn and its Rings
Pretty.
Definitely wallpaper/screensaver fodder.
[via digg]
New Bush Space Policy Unveiled, Stresses U.S. Freedom of Action
It's good that someone in Washington is thinking about space. I uh. I guess.
Many taking military shortcut to U.S. citizenship
[article and title stolen from fark]
Snow rejected the idea that Americans should be able to see and judge the standards for themselves, particularly in the aftermath of illegal abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.
"The only way accountability doesn't exist is if you believe that the military is not committed to it," Snow said.
Olbermann: The Day Habeas Corpus Died
Countdown Special Comment: Death of Habeas Corpus: Your words are lies, Sir.
Whenever you need to defend Command and Medical against xenomorphs, Samsung is there for you.
[via yuckf00]
A guy dressed up as V serving papers to various goverment offices, as a dry run for a V March on Washington. What a ridiculous state our nation has come to, when this works as valid political commentary outside of a comic book or movie.
I wouldn't mind seeing this. Thankfully it seems they enjoy filming themselves trying to get unmasked and arrested.
[UPDATE] Guess it went okay.. While the basic premise is amusing, and provocative, it doesn't seem very dignified. Not that I really expect politicians to pay more attention to everyday citizens than they do crazy people dressed up as a comic book/movie character dressed up as a guy who tried to blow up the British gov't. I guess everything has to have a hook.
Viet Nam, the first place I think of when I want to talk to someone about Iraq.
sigh.
Damascus steel, an early, early, early adopter of nanotube tech.
Articles of Impeachment against Bush and Cheney
The irony of the author's handle should not be lost on anyone.
Firefly actors show up to scammer-cancelled con
And you wonder why people are insanely loyal to the show.
[via xeno]
(And there's that Firefly MMO thing... but Dan says all I need to on that.)
Jason Dixon debugs a networking issue
The kind of feature I'd like to see more of on undeadly, really.
Makes me wish I had a house I could put the thing in. With 2.5 kids and 3/4th of a dog. 2.1532 Segways in the garage, etc.
[via digg]
Review: BOOQ's PythonXM[system] Laptop Backpack
While I haven't been big into backpacks in well over a decade, B@@Q -- errr, I mean, BOOQ's PostSleeve S90 is a pretty nice looking little bag.
The other sleeve the review mentions, the Vyper M2, is pretty hardcore. And if those rumors about the 12" MacBook are true, and y'know, after I've waited for the RevBs to come out, I would be pretty tempted to pick one up.
That said, I am still super happy with my Waterfield Cargo, which is the second piece of kit I've bought from them in a few years (the other was a 12" sleeve; when my 12" work PowerBook stayed at work and I left, I had to get a bigger bag for the newly released MacBooks. It's a crime, I know). Their service is also way awesome.
Stephen Hawking Reflects on Life & Fame
Hawking, 64, was asked if his predicament had ever led him to consider ending his life.
"I think a person should have a right to end their life if they want, but I think it would be a great mistake," he replied. "However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. While there is life, there is hope."
In the chaos of Iraq, one project is on target: a giant US embassy
Note the "Behind Schedule" section:
- Basic infrastructure projects failed.
- Medical projects failed.
- Security projects failed.
- Oil production is almost nominal.
And yet this "embassy" we're dropping $600,000,000 on will have "the biggest swimming pool in Iraq, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, a cinema, restaurants offering delicacies from favourite US food chains, tennis courts and a swish American Club for evening functions."
Ah, well. "Government's work is God's work."
Presumably the in-house harem service is being billed as a few gold-plated toilet seats.
If only I could harness the EM field that surrounds me and kills hardware dead, I could totally zap brains that are annoying me.
Weaponized harb.
[via russ]
White House proposes retroactive war crimes protection
So long, habeus corpus. So long, accountability. So long...
I'd like to see an updated version of School House Rock's I'm Just A Bill. Anyone feeling particularly cynical and clever?
"The infinite bravery of the basement-dwelling, cheeto-dusted, internet tough-guy's mind"
An excellent article about dumb-fuck Internet jerkbags. The typical atrophied armchair assholes you get on IRC, web forums... anywhere, really, but concerning specifically the Virtual Jack Bauer element.
[via mdxi]
An excellent kinda-interview with Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart. Moyers doesn't really do much interviewing: He asks a couple questions but it's mostly Stewart talking about why The Daily Show does The Daily Show.
He likens TDS to a political cartoon, which is as fair a description as anything I've heard it called.
The one point I disagree with is that we're a nation of people you can trust to treat like adults. Maybe that was true once. I doubt it is now. We've had our information managed and fed to us in fun-sized chunks for so long, I really wonder how we'd react to a return to even the partial openness of government from say, ... hm. Actually. When has government ever really been open or about anything other than a bunch of rich white guys getting what they want?
In vaguely related news, I sure am glad they decided to try and impeach Cheney first, not that it'd ever happen. But, one hopes that Bush in charge means we at least have a thin buffer between pure fucking corporate cock-sucking evil and actual policy simply due to the President's seemingly inherent incompetence.
One hopes.
Jimmy Carter Is Displeased With You, President Bush.
Recant Your Evil Ways Or Face the Consequences.
I mean, look at that photo. Would you want President Carter making that unhappy face at you? He is usually so happy and smiling and positive.
9/11, Iraq, Katrina, our civil liberties... And now Bush has made Jimmy Carter sad.
What next, he kills a kitten with a baby's stolen candy?
OpenSolaris: Five updates conservative developers should make
Some really good points listed therein.
I dream about the days when our code all runs happily on Solaris, is packaged up in SRV4 streams, and I can open "add DTrace providers to stuff" tickets...
- Farscape Gets Ten "Webisode" Series: I love Farscape. I really do. But "webisodes"? arrrgh.
- Babylon 5: The Lost Tales: Much more palatable than bloody "webisodes", but mainly linked to for the JMS interview. Pre-ordered, though without G'Kar...
- 120GB WD Digital Passport: This is definitely a nice-looking little device for when you just can't sneakernet all that prehistoric dino pr0n on your iPod anymore.
- Scifi Disel ads: The last one is definitely my favorite.
- Hungarian Information Service - Alertmap: Ongoing crisises around the world. In Flash.
- Bash hackers wiki: For all your bash usage/scripting needs. Nice.
- Henry Rollins interview: In which he discusses his trip to Iran, Black Flag, youth culture, and misc.
And Pachabel throws the horns.
Dude definitely wore a pink tux to the prom. No frilly crap, though. Gotta keep those lines streamed.
Adam O'Donnell and Ralph Logan on yet more DNS hackery to keep the botnet candles lit.
rjbs grumbled a couple weeks ago about how annoying it is the vast majority of software and network problems are simply caused by people being jerks.
Forsooth.
At First BBQ Of The Summer (pt. 1) yesterday, Nick Kirsch mentioned that Max Barry (Jennifer Government, Company) had written a blog post reviewing books he has not actually read, and why.
I find it somewhat hilarious that I have yet to read Phineas Poe for the exact same reason.
I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to books I have not gotten around to reading, for one reason or another. Some have been on there for years. When it comes to my reading list, seniority obviously does not matter.
Also happy to say that Max Barry is back on my daily reads, even if he gave a positive review to Hammerjack, which was pretty awful.
Not sure how he managed to sneak off my bookmarks.
The tunnels are sized so it's easy to move the giant robots around.
Or, you know, so when a xenomorph infestation breaks out, they'll have appropriate environments available.
China Regulating Buddhist Reincarnation
[via jcap]
Video and audio in various downloadable or streaming formats of Gibson's talk in Berkely are available at fora.tv.
A guy in front of me (the only other person I talked to who had actually finished the damn book) was in the front row and filmed the Philly talk. I gave him my biz card, so hopefully he will remember to email me when he uploads it to YouTube.
[via wbg]
After messing around with plain old Jumpstart for a day, I got sick of it and decided to try out Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit after eryc mentioned it, a bunch of code living on stop of Jumpstart meant to make lives easier. It does. Getting things set up, adding hosts, etc, goes from being kind of tedious to trivial. The real killer for me was dealing with Solaris's DHCP manager. Man, what a weird, annoying thing.
So now I have Jumpstart set up in Parallels on my laptop (that's 30GB I won't be getting back anytime soon), which is a pretty useful thing to have. I suppose next I'll set an FAI VM for those Debian boxes I still haven't replaced...
Here is the HOWTO I used as a starting point, and also the JET wiki.
Someone in #opensolaris yesterday mentioned they had a Debian Etch zone branded zone running. And it looks pretty trivial to do, too.
Derek Crudgington, of Joyent, has a post over on his blog about using DTrace to instrument MySQL (which does not have any DTrace probes). As long as you know the function names you're interested in, you can some really useful information out of it.
The fact that you can get that information, which would typically get you a major performance hit from MySQL itself, without MySQL having to be touched, restarted, or impaired, is just another example of how great DTrace is.
That looks fantastic.
Full Throttle and Grim Fandango were perhaps some of the best adventure games to come out of '90s. Along with Sam & Max Hit the Road, they're some of my most favoritest games ever, plur, etc. They remind me of when games were meant to be hilarious, unique and fun, before the dark times of LucasArts pumping the flaccid junk, corpse-like junk of a certain franchise to spew out another tepid crap-fest.
I suck and have yet to play Psychonauts, though everyone from dragorn to Adam have called me names for not having done so (and really, Adam telling someone they should play a video game would be enough to check it out if only I didn't suck so much).
Hooker raped and robbed - by justice system?
Sounds like a typically awful L&O: SVU plot, frankly...
This city seems to get more broken every day.
"Fuck you, if you don't think Portal's great, you must be stupid."
I love that man. I really do.
So I have to say that out of all the features hyped in Leopard, Time Machine seems to be worthy of it. It really does make backups trivial.
I had a bunch of tarballs in ~/Desktop which were basically transient. I didn't want them backed up, but backed up they got, eating a couple gigs of space pointlessly. My initial reaction was to just rm them from the backup dirs, but I was told (as root) I could not. I don't really like being told I can't do things when I'm root, but ok, maybe there's other magic required. Maybe it's not as flat-filesystem-y as one is led to believe.
A quick Googling later, and the answer was thankfully trivial. The Time Machine UI is ... totally weird enough ... that I've been avoiding it. But nice to see it's so easy to do something so obvious.
onlamp has an interview with the OpenBSD devs on what's new 4.2. Basically: Lots.
The highlights for me are doubled pf performance, IP load-balancing with CARP, and layer 7 hostated support (with HTTP/SSL hackery). Marc Espie's continuing improvements to the package management system are also no doubt going to continue making my life easier.
All in all, a very exciting release! Go buy your CD!
Yay! New Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku show. Ok, sure, on Fox. But seven guaranteed eps. That's something.
The basic idea sounds very similar to the meat puppets in Gibson's Burning Chrome, and what Molly did to pay for her upgrades in the Sprawl books. Whoo, neural shunts and personality overlays.
Still, they could totally pull some The Prisoner shit with Dollhouse if they wanted. ;-)
<kitten`> I was tired of Joss Whedon shows featuring a female character with superhuman martial arts abilities taking on improbable, insumrountable tasks while not being aware of the subtle manipulations of an unknown and sinister nemesis.
<kitten`> Oh, wait.
<bda> bah. :)
I think it is safe to be excited about it, though. Here's hoping, anyway.
What the fuck.
Predator-Alien hybrid from AvP2
I can just see these guys sitting around a table going:
"Okay, man, last time we had the aliens fight the Predators, how are we gonna RAMP THIS UP? WE GOTTA TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL."
"Oh, yeah, totally."
"So what are we gonna do?"
"We could give the aliens guns."
"No, that's stupid. Let's make a chick Predator. With big boobs."
"Hey, cool. But that's not TOTALLY RAMPED UP. What else?"
"Hmm."
"Hmmmm."
"Alien chicks! With big boobs!"
"No, no. Even I think that's stupid and I'm totally stoned right now. What about a .. uh. Alien. Predator. Hyberthingy. Like they had that dog alien thing in the third one."
"Woah. It could have like... three secondary mouth thingies."
"NEXT LEVELED!"
(Ok, apparently the predalien -- ugh -- was in the last movie and also in the games. I don't remember it from AvP, and I didn't play the second one. I don't care. It's fucking stupid.)
Marissa is posting again.
(again)
Finally.
I think abandon has been the only constant bookmark I've had since first running across the site in '99. Back then she was posting somewhat regularly, and reading it was honestly one of the highlights of my day.
I reckon that makes me a blogstalker of some flavor or another.
Also really wish I'd archived her posts, as everytime she reboots the site, they're annoyingly missing. There was much goodness there. Hopefully this new story-snippet format will persist, because I simply don't have much in the Amy-Hempel-level arena to read.
(And yes, I equate them.)
Y'know, there aren't many products out there that make me wish I was a 12 year old girl.
See Also: Better Days, the new Serenity comic series slated for March.
[via danelope]
Ben Rockwood expounds upon the joys of IPMI.
As someone who was only using it to reboot his systems (and configure the SP when I'd forgotten to do so during build), it's a pretty enlightening article.
Popular Mechanics explores an endeavor to convert my childhood home into a self-sufficient green community.
Some of the tech they're using, and the mix-and-match policies, make it sound actually viable.
Pretty exciting stuff.
New material pushes the boundary of blackness
One step closer to building the stuntship from The Restaurant at the End of of the Universe for the sole purpose of launching it into the sun.
Ben Rockwood digs into some odd disk activity using your friendly neighborhood Solaris tools.
WASHINGTON—Reports surfaced Tuesday that the New York–based Fox News Channel has obtained a tape which purportedly features another cryptic video message from U.S. vice president and known extremist Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most feared man in America.
Scholar Looks for First Link in E-Mail Chain About Obama
Her conclusion? A stand alone complex.
Also, Philly-based!
Why weren't they doing this on the myriad occasions I was wondering around Old City? ;-)
Dr. Horrible sequel and a DVD contest announced. The musical commentary sounds... hilarious. (Joss & Crew)++
Also, note the remote control iPhone link at the bottom of the post.
Sweet.
I have yet to see a NIN show. Given that the first CD I ever bought was NIN's Broken, I am pretty sure this fact, more than anything else, makes me incredibly lame.
Punch 'em in the dick, coming at you via Danelope.
Certainly doesn't remind me of the 2006 Pumpcon tagline...
Building A Solaris Cluster Express Cluster in VirtualBox
Pretty interesting stuff. VBox on OS X is not incredibly useful to me (the lack of host networking is a killer), but I run OpenSolaris on my desktop at work.
Very cool stuff.
New Dr. Horrible content in the works, and the soundtrack is apparently soon to be released.
Huzzah!