I'm over two weeks late with that posting but I wanted to mention that The Quiet Room is a very interesting movie. I watched it two weeks ago on SBS, from 0030 to 0230 or so...any paid for staying up late on the next day.
Liked it a lot: not silly saccharine-sweet but low-key, touching, funny at times and quite profound: Rolf de Heer must have been listening to his kids very very well. An adult kids movie, maybe. My recommendation.
These folks make an instant translator for English to Arabic, Darpa-sponsored, for the military. I'm so waiting for the news of what happens when the first of the gadgets goes to la-la land and hands out something Pythonesque...
analog has shown a curiously large amount of accesses to the killarney site with myspace.com Referer headers. Looked at the actual logs, and found out that a stupid girl had simply included my logo on her (hideous! eye-cancer alert!) page. Sweet. No clickable link, not a private copy, nope: just sourced in my image from my server. Without asking, of course (which would have been courteous and she'd have gotten permission easily).
I can't contact the silly fool since she has no email address on her site and I'm definitely not going to sign up to myspace (not even using an ephemeral throw-away address from Trash Mail).
mod_setenvif and mod_access to the rescue! Dear sweetblonde247: Your accesses to logo.png are now denied. Learn some manners (and web design, too). HTH, HAND.
Melbourne is nice to visit, going to interesting conferences is cool, too. But that's about it. If you ever consider submitting anything to an event that uses CG Publisher - don't! or you will be trapped in its maze of annoying disfunctional crap, missing announcements, illogical user interface and so on.
Now if you had read this in a call for papers,
"Submissions are limited to 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins excluding bibliography (if any) and appendices. Appropriate file formats include PDF, plain text, or any file that can be read with Open Office."
and that in an email from the organisers after (an odyssey of a) final submission
"Could you please submit your final paper in something other than a PDF please? Original file, HTML or Open Office are acceptable. Unfortunately, a PDF is not, as we can't integrate it into the rest of the proceedings document."
and if you know me then you will not be overly surprised that my response ran along the lines of
"You can have LaTeX, Postscript or PDF. I won't use Openoffice and I won't write papers in HTML - the same as you won't write real software in GW-BASIC."
In other news it becomes not just likely but absolutely certain that I
suck at using a caulking gun. Even with latex-based sealant (which is heaps
easier to use than silicon) I can't get a straight-lined wedge of goo
done :-(
Tried it for the third time tonight but ended up wiping all the crap off again
and throwing the cartridge across the room in disgust.
Enrico Zini notes under a heading of "Spam is useful":
Really. I just realized that. In the past, if you wanted to test mail delivery on your mail server, you had to bother logging to a remote server and sending yourself a mail. Now that's not needed anymore: as soon as the server works, spam messages start coming in. So it's not spam, it's PING mails.
He's got a point there. I've been doing the same with my recent spam/virus reduction setup changes (switched to mimedefang and love it; more on that in another post).
Scientists have engineered a molecule that "walks in a straight line" when fed (thermal) energy. They call it a nano-walker.
Now why am I so reminded of the "imp" of the immortal core war game? Molecule Wars, anyone?
The chipboard industry is collapsing! Particleboard prices soar! Widespread disruptions affect building industries, housing and interest rates! The End of the World is near! Save Your Homes!
That's how I felt on Tuesday, after having read &rw's note of two weeks ago: Ikea Brisbane was out of The One Billy bookshelf (White, 202x60). "They've arrived at the port, will be on the shelves in a day or two". sigh They need an public stock inventory. I very much dislike driving 60km one way to see only brown, black, ugly Billys.
One of the reasons I bought this Siemens S55 is that it has infrared, the same power/comms connector as the elder models and that I have software for my palm pilot to sync address books and do SMS.
One out of these three proved to be correct: it talks via infrared. The connector is not entirely unlike the old one, just sufficiently different to prevent working. And the software? The software relies on the magics of ITU standards and Siemens' previously established+documented AT command set...which the German Bastards decided to not follow for this model.
So, what do you do if your trusty software barfs all the time with errors about "AT+CPBS=ME" failing, and the software of course hasn't been maintained since at least three years ago? Right: first you curse (doesn't help but relieves the anger). Then you look for alternatives (to no avail, they all suck worse). Finally, you take up the heavy duty tools and kludge together a bloody mess of a fix.
First I found out what exactly goes wrong. The software wants to look at both possible sources for addressbooks, the sim card and the phone. It can access the sim card but not the phone (that's the AT+CPBS=ME operation which Siemens decided not to support in this model anymore. Idiots.).
Then the messy fix. RsrcEdit is a very useful if ugly tool to edit palm objects on the fly; I didn't want to wade through the m68k machine code to yank out the references to the second storage location, so I decided to have it look at some working addressbook instead: of the few other accessible areas only ON (own numbers) is writable. So I simply replaced the strings in the data segment of the program suitably so that the ON addressbook is used instead of the ME addressbook. Works. Done.
The result of a quip by one of the cow-orkers today, after a very useless meeting with some minion of the Evil Overlords. Sigh.
Once Upon A Time, Polaroid made a nice simple elegant model of sunglasses. I had two sets of these over the years; of course they broke and no matching replacement was to be found. Grief struck Yours Truly.
I do occasionally browse Crazy Clark's and similar junk shops, and one day about four years ago they had a near-copy of said model sunnies for the unbearable price of $1. All hail the junk shop! Didn't I look great? bruahaha snif
But even such pricey high-quality gear has a definite best-before date, and so the sunnies went south a few months ago (metal fatigue near the hinge). Naturally this happened just before the trip to AT and I was stuck with my flying sunnies (which one of my sisters said remind her of "Puck die Stubenfliege"). I didn't find any nice sunnies in Austria. Maybe it's the weather or the people scowling from birth that render sunnies unnecessary, I don't know.
Back here I embarked on another quest for gear (my brain wasn't good for anything useful after the long flights anyway) - and found another reasonable model in Yet Another junk shop (The Reject Shop, IIRC). I was content, and the sunnies cost a reasonable $6. True to the shop's name the sunnies developed a crack through one glass after 15 minutes of wearing. Of course the shop had exactly one single set of this model so it was back to square one.
But finally some (likely) Chinese knock-off artists came to the rescue: in a "Cheap Designer Sunnies" shop (oh the irony!) I found a near-perfect "Armani" model among the tons of gargoyle-style stuff. $30 is a bit much but they fit, look like I want it and I'm happy. End of Story.
Picture me drinking tea. Lots of tea.
click here for the rest of the story...
Seems like the recent problems with my DAT changer are SCSI related;
it's taken out heffalump three times in the last two days.
There goes my hope of making a SCSI chain work which consists of a wide controller, two SCA drives internally, a Sun 68-to-50 cable followed by the narrow changer+tape unit and a narrow terminator at the end of the mess. (I don't have any wide cables, sockets etc. to fix up the narrow tape changer...)
Of course this is -as SCSI goes- not a big surprise; everybody knows that termination issues can only be resolved with judicious application of candles, knives and goats. The fact that my setup has worked fine for a few weeks only reaffirms the Magic SCSI Properties.
One or the other silly Waste The Day student club/association/bunch at work has recently run an annoying ad campaign all over the place; 2m x 1m display stands everywhere with Shiny Stuff on them and so on.
Most memorable (for its tackiness) slogan:
"Be Not Afraid of Sudden Fear" (Book of Proverbs)
He. Come to one of my exams unprepared and you'll get some sudden fear to be afraid of! Bloody dimwits.
The campaign was centered around their "free exam pack" which exceeded all levels of shite I've seen before (despite being printed on glossy paper): a list of common sense exam "tips" (ala "bring a pen") and on the bottom of the shiny flyer some discount vouchers for various entertainment in Surfers. blink Ah, that's where the money for this junk came from...
...and this (brilliant) scientific paper generator; I'll have to borrow some of their phrasing (and the diagram generator) for my own future papers. Because obviously only frilly hot air accomplishes anything on this stinking planet.
Disgruntled Cynic? Me? Where do you get that impression?
I've got a perl CGI thing that needs to check in data files with ci,
because of child-safety and Tracking Revisions Is Good.
click here for the rest of the story...
...but things do work. Eventually.
click here for the rest of the story...
this will do. After all the bloody murkins confiscated the "art exhibit" these were part of.
State of Sabotage, Now!
When I read that I thought they'd salted him, or stuffed His Vileness or smoked him down to a shrivelled piece of dead meat...but dammit, he's still breathing.
Along those lines: see what rone cooked up about stupid old Karol (giggle).
Seen on a delivery truck the other day: "Pallet Express - too forking easy"
Hear, hear: "Kudzu is not without disadvantages." More on Kudzu and Kudzu-covered $foo here. Almost Zen-like.
I'm rereading Feersum Endjinn. Ah, what fun.
There is just not enough Dada in today's world right now, so I think I'll be posting some Absurdly Silly Useless Weird Thing of the Day for the next while or so.
This is number 1: jakt-wif-lotza-pokits. I like that term, but it's too hot to wear a jacket in this place so I do s/jakt/shurz/.
Just finished packaging the newest version of Exmh for Debian: most of my debianism-patches were accepted upstream, pretty nice. Upload done, the package should become available in a few hours.
This release speeds up things considerably; 2.6 and 2.7.0 had suffered badly from a crawling flist and sequences implementation. 2.7.2 finally takes care of that issue and seems to work fine here (I did pull in a few patches from CVS when minor problem reports popped up just after the release).
Only tweak I had to make relates to Edit_Done which now expects a third (dummy) argument. In my setup (don't ask, here be tentacles) emacs's mh-e lisp code handles composing emails and MIME and then tells exmh to send the resulting thing (by forcefeeding a "send exmh Edit_Done..." command to wish cough via cough echo coughcough and a UCHHHU shell pipe. Protecting the required "{}" arg from emacs and the shell was less than elegant, but stinking wish only runs commands coming from files, not the command line). All this is so that exmh can do the nifty annotation stuff but cannot commit any MIME mutilations (as mhn sucks plenty). Do you really want to know more? I don't think so.
Or is it just the ones who do movies? I really adore Finnish movies, they're all barking mad, sick and gaga. Just the right thing for me.
This film was no different: just saw Raid on SBS, and absolutely loved it. Great humour, dark and nasty at times, superb dialogue (even without grokking Finnish, subtitles do work here), just terriffic! Felt a bit like a more modern Kottan.
And I felt reminded of that dislike when I helped rho and Anitta do some
new cables in their house last year.
click here for the rest of the story...
Now that isn't new. New are some manifestations I've been dealing with
recently.
click here for the rest of the story...
The ABC broadcasts Baraka tonight. Ahh, lotsa goodness. Not that I haven't got a copy of the movie anyway, but still: always good to see the public telly stations make a good non-mainstream program decision.
Last time I saw the movie I started pestering my family for CDs of the Rustavi Choir, David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir and Keith Jarrett; two out of those three should be almost in the mail by now...
Hijacking an airplane: 25 years of Special Lodging.
Beating somebody to death: 13 years.
Raping a child: 11 years.
Selling marijuana while
posessing a gun: 55 years.
Welcome to the home of the brave, land of the free, bulwark of proportionate measures...
...wird sehr schön illustriert von dieser Österreichisches Deutsch DB.
they've bolted a "yahoo groups" hump <barf> onto the usenet
archive, also adding "features" like email hiding
in the message, body as well as headers - which means that
whatever their stupid robot thinks is an email - ie. anything before and
after an at sign anywhere is replaced by
x...@yourdomain.tld. message ids are obfuckated, too.
all
your postings are belong to them (they think). you can't
respond (without signing up for "google groups" - yeah right...) and
you can't see the email addys anywhere at all.
an interesting thing that came up during the obligatory /. discussion of this stupid
move:
apparently the berne convention (which seems to have been ratified even by the silly murkins) states the the author has the right "...to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation." well, displaying my posts to usenet mangled, with an email address that is invalid and not mine, and without my message ids, breaking all the MIDs or email addresses i may have included in the posting certainly is damaging my reputation as a nerd, nitpicker and Bastard. THEREFORE I OBJECT! <sfx:manic cackle, caused by the realisation that no one cares anyway> so far most of the country TLD google portals still use the old useful dejagoogle interface, so not all is lost just yet. for a reputedly tech-savvy and insightful company like google this is an insultingly stupid move earning them a center place in the front row against that wall when the revolution comes.
Grad im Leiberl-Stapel gesehen, und als hinreichend antik erkannt:
Tja, lang ists her snif. Beide Leiberln sind - wie üblich bei mir - nicht gebügelt, aber auch nach 7 Jahren durchaus noch anziehbar (B-Cat: nicht mehr perfekt aber noch nicht C-Cat: untilgbare Lack-, Dreck- oder Falschfarben-Flecke; Proto-Putzfetzen).
Well, nowaday's news certainly are good for meteor showers. And ulcers, lots of ulcers - or don't you feel a little powerless whenever you look at what the bastards in power do to this planet and the human race? Anyway, for the masochists out there here's my current list of RSS/ATOM news sources. Enjoy.
Riverbend is a girl living in Baghdad.
derstandard's offers tend to suck more and more. nevertheless one of the few Austrian newspapers still remotely readable.
