I have been wondering what the references to “I put on my robe and wizard hat” in xkcd meant and decided to Google it. Apparently it is a reference to a guy, known primarily as Bloodninja, who enters cybersex chat rooms and role plays in unexpected ways. Turns out he is hilarious and you can read about his antics here.
Note: His material might not be 100% SFW.
Here is a collection of some of the most well known unsolved mysteries (links to Wikipedia). They make for good reading on a rainy day.
Wow! Signal - Possibly extraterrestrial signal caught by SETI on August 15, 1977
Valentich Disappearance - Disappeared without a trace in a Cessna October 21, 1978 after reporting that he encountered a strange flying object
The Lost Colony - 16th century colony where all the inhabitants disappeared
Mary Celeste - Brigantine ghost ship discovered outside the strait of Gibraltar in December, 1872
Felix Moncla - USAF pilot that disappeared while pursuing an unidentified flying object in 1953
Ararat Anomaly - Unidentified object visible via satellite and aerial reconnaissance in a hard to reach location on mount Ararat
Oak Island - Location of a strange pit that many believe contain a hidden treasure
Although only indirectly linked with deathtraps I found this article about The World’s Spookiest Weapons highly intriguing. I found it via Hack a Day.
They referenced the gay bomb in the last episode of 30 Rock but I assumed it was only a joke, stupid me.
Couple this with the old russian embassy in Bangkok and you have a pretty neat spy novel.
I switched back to WordPress again. Movable Type had some really cool features but the admin interface was just waay too slow. It could take anywhere from 30-60 seconds to switch page or save a blog entry which was simply unbearable. I tried getting the FastCGI interface to work but it refused to run and documentation was scarce to say the least.
In an act of pure magic I managed to recover most, if not all, of my old posts from an old SQL dump I found on an even older disk. All the time I expected there to be a full database backup on my old server which I meant to restore just as soon as I had access to the machine. As it turns out my backups were all located on the disk that died, the very same disk where the live database was located. Sometimes I scare myself..
Luckily though I had a slightly older dump available on the surviving hard drive and after creating a sandbox Wordpress installation I was able to export my old blog and import it into this one so in the end it all turned out fine anyway.
Right now I’m feeling extremely pissed off and sad, both at the same time. I have been using Linux for more or less 10 years now. By “using” I mean that it has been my primary OS for every purpose you could possible use a computer for. Ok it’s not entirely true, I replaced Linux with FreeBSD for about a year back in 2000 or somewhere around that time. The reason I switched to Linux was simple and I think many of you will recognize it. The major operating system on home computers at the time, you know the one, was extremely bug ridden and unstable and had very little to offer in terms of functionality. Some will argue that it is still unstable and bug ridden but in my limited experience things are much better now than back in the older days in those terms.
Very quickly I learned that Linux had a lot of powerful tools to offer which helped you in everyday matters if only you spent a little time getting to know them. Tools such as find, grep, sed, vi and so on are invaluable and I feel utterly lost without them. The other operating system has virtually no useful tools installed in the base install and even if you go out and waste (a lot of) money on their horrible development package you’ll find yourself with the definition of a bloated GUI where every power tool will be hidden under layers and layers of menus without offering console equivalents. It’s not like the GUI was usable in the first place. Why do focus follow mouse clicks and why on earth isn’t this configurable? Why is it that there are no system logs whatsoever? Why does the system hang for minutes upon minutes during boot if there is no DHCP reply leaving the user in limbo as to what is going on? Now all these issues are moot to me as I do not use this operating system and have no plans on doing so in the near future but to a lot of people this is very much the reality and to an unlucky bunch has been forced upon them. How fascist!
Where was I .. oh, yes .. In recent years Linux adoption by “regular” users has started to grow rapidly. I though this was a great thing at first and I even did my best to help these people ease into the transition. As time went by I started realizing that more and more people around me were Linux users and several of them had jumped on the bandwagon in the last year or so. “Great!”, I thought at the time but recently I have slowly started to come aware of the dark side of it all.
To me applications like Samba are a solution which makes it possible for people who choose to use lesser operating systems to interact with the rest of the world. Personally I like NFS and SSHFS (FUSE), depending on the purpose I think both these solutions do a very good job. If you want service discovery multicast DNS services such as Rendezvous, Avahi etc do an excellent job. You have a portable system which cannot be beaten, why on earth would I need a severely crippled system like SMB other than when interacting with someone on a crippled system?
Back to the issue at hand. Recently I’ve started hearing complaints from the recent Linux switchers. This is all good as no system is perfect and in the beginning I thought it would be refreshing to hear complaints from someone with a different background. Now I’m starting to realize the surmounting disaster that we are soon to face. These people want Linux to plug right into their legacy infrastructure built on top of SMB and other bad solutions. It doesn’t matter that they have replaced their systems with Linux which offers all these “new” shiny features, they still cling to the legacy crap. In the beginning I tried to reason with them but I soon learned that this was impossible. Stupid people don’t get smart just because they made one smart move in their life. With the growing presence of commercial interests I fear that we are going to see major Linux distributions move more and more towards being a bolt-on replacement to their original systems. Resources are going to be spent on making Linux compatible with legacy solutions rather than getting these companies to invest in upgrading their existing infrastructure. Others should be forced to adapt to modern, intelligent standards than forcing Linux to implement proprietary, badly designed, protocols. I fear that Linux is going to become the “new” OSX. All the power tools will be present on the system but most users will have no idea that they exist or how to use them.
The reason I’m pissed is that I am really really fed up with people trying to explain to me why I should be using SMB or why vi is so bad. Why KDE is so much better than GNOME and then having no clue about all the other options like Fluxbox (which I am using), Enlightenment and so on. Why some distribution is bad because it doesn’t automatically call WINE when double clicking an EXE-file, if they had just bothered to STFW they would have set that up in less than 2 minutes btw. If they don’t like the Unix philosophy then why on earth are they using Linux?
Maybe I’m a digital millenium racist but right now I feel that all the switchers should simply go back to their old operating system and leave the rest of us be. I don’t tell them that of course as it would be counter productive.
I’m seriously considering going back to FreeBSD. I loved FreeBSD and the only reason I went back to Linux was due to two drivers, one of which exists for FreeBSD today and the other I don’t need anymore. The BSDs are (luckily) further away from mainstream adoption and do not suffer from the mass of ignorant people infesting the Linux community.
I’ve never been a fan of blurting out RTFM or STFW but I’m seriously considering starting now.
I saw Resident Evil: Extinction today. Unlike some other people I know I really did enjoy the first movie in the installment. The acting wasn’t bad for the genre and the story and setting was well developed. Apocalypse, the second one, was a travesty not much unlike most sequels these days. Milla Jovovich made a barely passable job at acting and the story didn’t really encourage anyone to make an effort to begin with. I did not have high expectations when I heard there was going to be a third one.
My first impression was that this was going to be better than Apocalypse and after having watched the entire movie the final decision was that yes, it is slightly better. What put the entire movie down was that it is as if someone took Day of the Dead and cross pollinated it with Land of the Dead only changing minuscule details. Now both of these movies were great in their own way but putting them together and neither adding nor subtracting virtually anything does not make another great movie.
Extinction had potential and it is not as if they did not have the means to have made something more out of it, they simply didn’t do it. If you haven’t seen Day of the Dead and/or Land of the Dead I recommend you see them first. If you have watched every other decent movie in the Zombie genre out there give Extinction a go. It’s watchable and mildly entertaining if you are looking to kill an hour and a half but it will leave you with a feeling of sadness left inside.
At the last MöLUG meeting I was recommended the talk given at TED by Richard Dawkins on atheism. I like his “Selfish Gene Theory” so naturally I’m interested in any other theories he can put forward. This talk was a bit on the short side and a bit basic but still quite amusing.
If you do not believe in atheism you probably won’t find this very interesting.
Link in case you cannot see the embedded object or simply want to download the movie.
As you might have experienced if you’ve visited my site recently it has become quite unresponsive. It appears that MySQL doesn’t run very well on the UltraSPARC. I’ve tried increasing it’s memory footprint and put the entire database on a 4-disk SCSI RAID5 but to no avail.
Therefore I’m looking for a blogging engine, preferably similar to Wordpress in functionality, that does not depend on MySQL. I’m not sure what database backend would be appropriate but something that is much more lightweight than MySQL should do, like SQLite or Berkley DB. I’d like a system that will handle blogging, content uploads (images, tarballs etc), RSS and preferably something which will allow me to create simple pages where I can place downloads and textual content.
Although static HTML would accomplish all this something along the lines of Wordpress with a WYSIWYG editor and what not is preferable.
If you know how to optimize MySQL, if that is even possible, let me know.
I installed Google Analytics as I’ve heard some good things about it. If I don’t like it after a few days I’ll simply remove it. In the meantime, if you do not want to be tracked by Google simply reject all cookies from my domain.