This is just wrong. Funny as all hell, but wrong.
Archive for January, 2005
Living In Cell Block D
Friday, January 28th, 2005Link Dump
Thursday, January 27th, 2005These things weigh on my mind
Various and sundry things that caught our attention:
McGehee joins a cult, or something. I didn’t read it.
A couple from Fark:
Only in Florida? I’ve got jury duty tomorrow, so the City of San Diego owes me some perp-tapin’ hilarity.
They’ll never know the simple joys of a monkey knife fight…
Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, turn the music down and get a job, shitwit.
Unfark:
I AM A CITIZEN JOURNALIST AND I DEMAND EASY ACCESS TO YAHOO! VIDEO CHAT RECORDING. AND PIE!
No, nothing called a Big Mac could ever make you fat without you being told. Evil McCorporate bastards, turning the illiterate and inattentive into mindless fat-gluttons.
LATER: Conan, What is best in life?
The governor told reporters that he is “moving ahead” with plans to circulate ballot measures to implement his agenda, and he hinted strongly that he will not back off once he gathers the required number of signatures. He also insisted that a special election must be held this year, and contended that it would be worth the $50 million-plus cost if it ends the state’s years of budget deficits.
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Linux Rant
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005Warning: Holy Wars ahead
What bright spark, exactly, decided that separating the header files from the actual libraries in RPM based systems was a good idea? I mean really, I’d like to congratulate the guy for wasting my entire day dealing with plaintive cries from developers. “I can’t compile!” they’d mewl. “OK, what’s the problem?” I’d reply, “It can’t find gl.h” they’d say. And I thunk and I thought and realized that RedHat Enterprise Linux has things called -devel packages.
sigh
Not that their up2date application goes out of it’s way to point them out to you. No, that’s for keeping the system up-to-date, not installing new packages. Can’t have that, now can we? Nope, let’s have another tool to add packages, and let’s just accelerate the Windowsification of Unix by calling it “Add or Remove Programs”. And let’s make it try to update every out of date package on the system. ‘Cuz letting people just freakin’ install a thing and it’s dependencies easily, well that’s just too much to ask.
And let’s not get carried away and make the RedHat Network website at all intuitive or anything. I mean why should people expect anything on the page to stay the same when they’ve clicked on a link? People might be able to actually find things. In under an hour. Like the RPMs for the open source parts our system is made up of. Nope. That clearly won’t work. Instead, once the users actually find the page which lists the packages let’s make them click at least twice to get to a page where they can get the package.
I mean, it’s not like anyone’s ever come up with a decent package mangement system.
But, really, RedHat’s package management tools are the class of the field. If by class you mean “bottom” and by field you mean “barrel”.
Ahh, That’s Better
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005Yesterday: 500-odd spam comments got either posted, held in the moderation queue or caught by Kitten’s Spaminator.
Today? 30 caught by spaminator. None in the queue and none posted.
Solution: Closing comments on posts older than 21 days.
Result: NOT having a RCOB moment when I see my blog Inbox has 500 unread messages for ci4lis and online-poker-bigger-penis sites.
Now maybe I’ll actualy have time to write instead of spending all my time deleteing comments and banning IP addresses in my .htacces file.
Now to figure out why WordPress won’t send out trackback pings…
But first, more rum ‘n’ coke.
Happy Dead Lenin Day!
Friday, January 21st, 2005Paul informs us that today is the 81st anniversary of Lenin’s death.
Pity his vile ideology didn’t die with him.
Just In Case You Weren’t Already Convinced That The New Star Wars Movies Are Just Painful, Two-Hour Toy Commercials. (Like That Wasn’t Obvious When The Fucking Teddy Bears Showed Up In The Return Of The Jedi)
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005The Commonwealth Of Letters
Saturday, January 8th, 2005I was going to post this as a comment on Pejman’s* site, because this, and especially the reference to Agamemnon made me think of it.
Several months ago I was telling a friend about a book. Not just any book, but a Book. One that ranks right up there with The Lord Of The Rings, and Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson, even though it’s almost completely, but not quite, different than any of those. I couldn’t find my copy, and it appears to be out of print, so it kind of slipped my mind.
Anyway, I picked up my copy in 1987 or so (last I saw it, it was being held together by rubber bands) , just completely at random. There it was in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of the bookstore. Just one of those things that piques your interest while you’re browsing, so I got it. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.
This book, this wonderful, wonderful Book is called Silverlock And I can almost gaurantee you’ll love it. I really can’t do it justice by describing it, it’s full of references to classic literature (from Robin Hood to Beowulf to Mark Twain to Taliesin) and the story’s great fun.
We meet our eventual hero, A. Clarence Shandon shortly after a shipwreck, and he’s a bit of a bastard. He meets Widsith Amerigin Demodocus Taliesin Golias while still in the water, has a run in with Circe, goes into battle with Vikings and gets drunk with Beowulf. And that’s just to start. Along the way the characters and situations Shandon encounters turn him into much less of a bastard. Kind of a Pilgrims Progress, but not excruciatingly boring and also written after spelling was invented. Even if you hated reading the classics when forced to in high school you’ll recognize a lot of the people that Shandon runs into during his stay, and the ones you don’t recognize off the bat might get you curious enough to expand your reading habits a little, or at least spend some time on Google.
Seriously, do yourself a favor and read it. Join the Commonwealth Of Letters.
(*Also highly recomended to Robert the Wonder Llama, if only to make up for all the Jackie Collins he’s been reading lately.)
Well, It’s Not A Fake Turkey, But…
Friday, January 7th, 2005I’ll be setting up a new server room at work when we move into our new office in a couple months*. As every experienced sysadmin knows there are two hard-and-fast requirements for a server room: a ClueBat ™ and a poultry sacrifice to the Server Gods. In other words a Louisville Slugger with several sharpened nails driven through the business end** and a rubber chicken.
The ClueBat ™ is easy enough, requireing only a few nails and several minutes with a cordless drill (and perhaps some wood glue and a hammer) , but where to find the rubber chicken for the sacrifice to Jobu?
Of course, Archie McPhee. Should have been the first place I looked.
(*Once the contractors get through mis-wiring, putting all the outlets in upside down and running the UPS backed lines to random broom closets)
(**Sysadmins from Britian, Austrailia or the Subcontinent may, at their discretion, substitute a cricket bat. Nails optional, due to the increased bludgeoning surface.)
Beats Searching For Spare Change In The Couch, I Suppose
Tuesday, January 4th, 2005Zombyboy, in order to supplement his highly successful carreer as a Beverage Container Reclamation Technician* is starting a new venture.
Help a brother out, kick him down some leads.
*(I kid, I kid)