It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Friday, June 30
I HATE PERL
Just thought I'd mention that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
But its a P programming language.
As in it starts with P ! You like all the languages that start with P.
Posted by: Andrew at Friday, June 30 2006 08:52 PM (RWEVY)
2
I haven't had to deal with it much since college, but I remember it being amusingly counterintuitive. Everyone I work with seems to have dabbled in Perl and rolls their eyes when it's mentioned.
I think there's actually an I-hate-Perl song out there somewhere, to the tune of "Pearl Necklace" by ZZ Top.
Posted by: TallDave at Monday, July 03 2006 11:35 PM (H8Wgl)
3
Perl - Best. Language. Ever.
Posted by: Kevin at Tuesday, July 04 2006 04:31 AM (++0ve)
4
Perl - Best. Language. Ever.But for what, exactly?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 04 2006 08:47 AM (O0soJ)
5
Fast pattern matching is the reason I love it. It's also ridiculously easy to spit out scripts to do whatever you want done fast. The LWP module makes it good for scraping pages in any way you desire, quickly and efficiently.
Also, it's fun to say. There are plenty of other languages that can do whatever perl can do, perhaps better in some instances. But you can do anything with perl reasonably well, and write the script very quickly. If I had three hands, it would get three thumbs up from me.
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, July 05 2006 06:41 PM (++0ve)
6
For any kind of administrative work, data processing, and for that matter for most web scripting, Perl is a fantastic language. Once you can program idiomatically in Perl, you can do any of those things quickly and easily.
For general application work, or for interactive web pages, there are better languages (like Objective C and Java, respectively).
You know what I'd
really like? An explicitly object-oriented Perl (where it's not grafted on), with the ability to compile the resulting programs and also the ability to embed them (compiled or not) into web pages like Javascript. Mmmm... programming goodness...
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at Saturday, August 12 2006 09:51 PM (7Q2cA)
7
For any kind of administrative work, data processing, and for that
matter for most web scripting, Perl is a fantastic language. Once you
can program idiomatically in Perl, you can do any of those things
quickly and easily.And anyone who has to maintain your code will hate you forever.
That's the point.
I've done enough coding in Perl. Yes, it's fast, easy, powerful, flexible. And programs written in Perl STINK.
For general application work, or for interactive web pages, there are
better languages (like Objective C and Java, respectively).You sir, are a masochist.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 13 2006 11:33 AM (dluiY)
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Thursday, June 29
Sesame Seeds
There are a million files on my notebook, and it had to eat
cookies.txt?
Grr.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Tuesday, June 27
Not Even Wrong
Bill Keller, editor of the bleedin'
New York Times:
It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press.
The founders did no such thing.
The founders recognised a pre-existing freedom, and wrote the Bill of Rights to protect that freedom:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The founders gave no special freedom to the press at all. What they did was to forbid Congress to legislate
against freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.
That pillock Keller again:
The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly.
You haven't been
given anything. You have arrogated power to yourself, and hold yourself unnacountable.
Draping yourself in the Constitution at this point is not going to convince anyone.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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More to the point, "The Press" isn't/aren't the only people who get to exercise "freedom of the press". Every citizen has that right equally. The First Amendment <i>does not</i> sanctify "The Press" as any kind of fourth establishment of government in the US, or in fact recognize "The Press" as an institution in any way, shape, or form.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, June 28 2006 02:33 AM (+rSRq)
2
Good point.
When they say, "freedom of the press", they are talking about the use of printing presses. That is, individuals are free to speak what they think, and free to publish what they write.
This indicates that the use of "the Press" to mean the journalistic community is a 20th century development.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2006 04:00 AM (FRalS)
3
Tom Paine, for instance, was a pamphleteer, the 1700s equivalent of a blogger, not a newspaper. The Founders certainly understood the distinction.
Posted by: TallDave at Sunday, July 09 2006 04:04 PM (H8Wgl)
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Wednesday, June 14
Well, Crap
DVI does not support PC function.
It's still got a VGA input, but that's just stupid.
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Tuesday, June 13
Crapweasels 'R' Us
Okay, so my place-of-employment is going to buy me the full Adobe/Macromedia bundle, but haven't done so yet. And my 30-day-trial of Paint Shop Pro X has run out.
Paint Shop Pro does 90% of what I need, image-editing-wise, so I'd be happy to buy it. Especially since there's a special trial offer: If your 30-day-trial has run out, you can buy it for just $59, with free copies of Corel Photo Album 6 (which I don't need) and Photo Album Pastel Collection (which I very don't need).
Except that only one of those two is free, and you can't remove either one from your order. By clicking remove you can toggle which one you get for free, but you can't actually get rid of them.
And the offer only applies to US and Canada.
If you live in Australia, it's $299.
And though they have a link for Other Countries, it leads you to a search which cannot find anything.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, June 10
Overhead, Without Any Fuss...
I was feeling good this morning.
The chaos caused by the DDoS attack was largely over.
I have an interesting new project at work that will have spillover benefits for munu.
My new HDTV has arrived.
So has my copy of Rumble Roses XX.
I'd even had seven hours sleep, which is a record for the month so far.
The only problem left to fix was trackbacks, and that wasn't a huge priority. Trackbacks are nice to have, but 99.8% of them are spam anyway.
Oh yes, and the Zarkster had croaked.
So I settled in at my desk at work -
And then I find, over at munu, without any fuss, the blogs were going out. Every time someone got a comment, the main page of their blog would go blank.
I have absolutely no idea why this was happening.
All I know is that it didn't affect Ace.
Ace was running his own copy of Movable Type. An identical copy (in theory) but still a copy. Using the same database, but still a separate copy of the source code.
It took me a two hours of screaming frustration to find this out, but then I switched everyone over to Ace's copy of MT. And then whacked the server over the head repeatedly. And then it worked.
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Tuesday, June 06
NFS Is A Cow
We hates it!
Okay, the problem(s) this time:
If portsentry is running, you cannot start NFS. Solution: Stop portsentry, start portmap and nfsd, restart portsentry.
If sunrpc is not available as a kernel module, rpc.idmapd will not start. Without rpc.idmapd, you can't use NFSv4. Solution: Don't use NFSv4.
Everything is set up correctly, your mount requests are being accepted according to the syslog, and yet the client always sees "Permission denied". Solution: Add the line
none /proc/fs/nfs nfsd noauto,defaults 0 0
to /etc/fstab and
mount /proc/fs/nfs You can take the
noauto off once you're happy that everything works.
This, of course, is all explained in great detail in the man pages... err, the online howto's... err, in the kernel mailing list.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, June 06 2006 01:56 AM (+FLIL)
2
<i>Useful</i> documentation for open source software? You expected <i>useful</i> documentation? Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh... sob, moan, cry.
My server runs Linux, and if anything unexpected ever happens to it, I am deeply screwed. I've tried to figure it out, and I eventually gave up. (I can't even figure out how to use many of the basic features of ".htaccess" from the documentation; last time I tried to do something new, it shut my entire web site down until I backed out the change.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, June 06 2006 02:23 AM (+rSRq)
3
Yes, I expect useful documentation for open-source software. The documentation for Python, for example, is quite good. Not perfect, not the best I've seen, but more than adequate.
The documentation for Apache, on the other hand, is complete and utter crap.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 06 2006 03:25 AM (FRalS)
4
Lately I've decided the best help is provided by Google. I can solve 95% of my technical issues fastest that way, if I can get the phrasing right.
Now, if only Ace would spell my name the same every time. Then I could find all the stuff I sent him that he linked.
Posted by: TallDave at Thursday, June 08 2006 04:54 PM (iQC1I)
5
Re: Comment #5, got one of them, too, yesterday.
Posted by: Old Grouch at Saturday, June 09 2007 02:52 AM (f4kkX)
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Yeah, they're popping up all around mee.nu now. Coming from all different IP addresses too. I can design a spam-filter rule to exclude them, I think.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 09 2007 08:45 AM (PiXy!)
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Sunday, June 04
Plus Ça Change
One server taken out by a DoS attack, the other by a disk failure.
BUT I STILL GET SPAMMED.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Is this
you saying this:
On Mon Sep 05, 10:03:27 AM IST,
Pixy Misa said...
Thanks for this.
From the other list, I was starting to thinkg that "being poor" was "whining a lot".
And the two anonymouses above only confirm that opinion.
at:
http://zigzackly.blogspot.com/2005/09/being-poor-my-arse.html
in response to this?
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003704.html
Be honest.
J,
Posted by: G.T. at Monday, June 05 2006 05:59 AM (rxoAV)
2
Yes.
Not everything is relative.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 05 2006 06:14 AM (cThdm)
3
And John Scalzi agrees:
I see
this list as complementary to, and not in opposition to, my original
list, and it highlights the difference between relative poverty (which
is the situation in the US), and absolute poverty (which is the
situation in much of the rest of the world). Being poor in the US is a completely different situation to being poor in Bangladesh. Or 8th-century England, for another example. Being poor in the US, today, is to be wealthy beyond dreams and surrounded by opportunity -
in comparison to most of the world and most of human history.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 05 2006 06:21 AM (cThdm)
4
Yah, what Pixy said, ten-fold.
I grew up poor. That's "poor" by 1970s and '80s US standards. The Army sent me to Korea in the mid-late '80s, and I saw poor. Major eye-opener, I'll tell you that.
Posted by: SteveF at Monday, June 05 2006 09:09 PM (RiE2L)
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Saturday, June 03
The Best Laid Plans
My plans for the weekend involved reading the new Harry Dresden book, having a big bowl of teriyaki beef don, playing with a kitten, and maybe prototyping some new blogging stuff.
They did not include migrating the whole of munu from one server to another to dodge a DoS attack, much less recovering from a hard disk failure during that migration.
So guess what I actually am doing.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Any idea who the actual target of the DoS was? (My guess was Ace, but I'm not familiar with the majority of your users so I'm probably wrong.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, June 04 2006 12:53 AM (+rSRq)
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I was WONDERING what was going on earlier. Sunuvabeechmartin!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, June 04 2006 01:04 AM (7+BNY)
3
If it was Ace, they missed, because I moved his blog to the other server two weeks ago.
Possibly The Jawa Report. There are a number of Munuvians who aren't, how shall I put this, the most practiced of diplomats, so it could be any of a number of people.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 04 2006 01:21 AM (cThdm)
4
No doubt someone disagreeing with my assessment of Wolverine's powers. *snort*
Either way, thank you for your efforts at bringing MuNuvia back up and running, Pixy... A Winner Is You!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, June 04 2006 03:26 AM (zBXYv)
5
We'll have to sling you an extra large care package of noodles, pokki and M&Ms to keep you going.
Much appreciated.
Baiting comicbook fanboyz is too easy. Hardly a challenge.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, June 04 2006 12:01 PM (P5BFK)
6
Presumed Guilty? Have fun with it, whenever you get to it. I've been favorably impressed with the changes made to the series as it has proceeded, and this one does much to establish a hidden order underpinning the entire series. Plus, the family Carpenter is back in the spotlight.
I'd be interested in whatever comments you have on it, again whenever you do get to it.
Posted by: HC at Sunday, June 04 2006 03:19 PM (Bgud/)
7
I'd say "getting
back to the
hidden order underpinning the entire series." It was stated as
far back as the werewolf novel, that something was fishy in Chicago.
Too many tomes, magic belts, and other weird things showing up; in fact
the very first novel opens up with an obvious mystery: who supplied the
book on demon summoning to the killer that targeted Harry?
But "Yay!" for the return of the Carpenters, I agree!
It was definately interesting to see Lily and Fix again; I'd always felt that
Summer Knight was one of the weaker books in the series, but they were good here.
Posted by: ubu at Sunday, June 04 2006 05:47 PM (ruy7Y)
8
Yes, Lily and Fix have grown up quite nicely.
Do you think that Butcher had planned this from the beginning? I believe that he started with a character, a genre, and a style (wizard, noir, two-fisted) and just threw problems at Dresden for the first few books. Afterward, it dawned on him that he had an indefinitely viable series on his hands, and he began to lay foundations to carry it forward.
He
might have been working on
this overplot as far back as kicking off the war with the Red Court in book three (see also, Leaninsidhe's/Mab's athame), but I wouldn't bet on it really coalescing much before book six or so, and maybe book seven.
This isn't really a criticism - his reconciliation of past problems with present conspiracies was quite clever, and I can honestly say that the series is improving visibly from book to book at this point. I'm particularly excited about the turn of events with SPOILER, as I think SPOILER is going to be particularly interesting character going forward, given SPOILER's SPOILER and SPOILER.
Incidentally, don't you wan't to know who used SPOILER on the gates of SPOILER? Or who was driving the car when it SPOILER?
Ah, Pixy - read the thing soon, to spare my caps-lock key, if not for its considerable merits.
Posted by: HC at Sunday, June 04 2006 11:29 PM (Bgud/)
9
Well, the kitten-playing and lunch-eating entries are ticked off, so I'll tackle the book-reading and blog-prototyping tomorrow. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 05 2006 01:52 AM (cThdm)
10
Yeah and now SPOILER knows about SPOILER! The response was about what I expected, but I'm beginning to wonder about the SPOILER that Harry's kept ever since SPOILER. And then there's making an enemy out of SPOILER. Better watch his step!
I'm disappointed that the Powers That Be have SPOILER but then an old 80's P.I. series occurs to me... and no, I don't mean Remington Steele; I mean the other one with a couple.
Posted by: ubu at Tuesday, June 06 2006 03:05 PM (dhRpo)
11
Do you really think Harry's made an enemy of SPOILER? I'm betting that what he did there was exactly what SPOILER wanted - SPOILER does not take kindly to orders, after all, and that whole situation could hardly have been a bigger mess if SPOILER were in on it, and SPOILER was apparently right on the scene, so why not?
I
think that I know who fixed the SPOILER, but that's only conjecture so far.
Harry's SPOILER that he has been keeping
is due for a plotline - but then, so it the
other SPOILER. Also, there's the suggestion that his duties will be expanded to include SPOILER, as well as the certainty that he'll have to spend a lot of time working on SPOILER'S SPOILER. All in all, no shortage of future plotlines.
I'm not up on 80's detective shows, but I think that the PTB pretty much had to have SPOILER. Besides, it's a return to the thematic roots of the series.
Posted by: HC at Tuesday, June 06 2006 05:25 PM (Bgud/)
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