<p> So, last night we went over to some friends&#39; house to celebrate the end of 2006 and the advent of 2007. And as the fateful moment approached our timezone, in an effort to keep ourselves awake, we discussed our respective worst moments of 2006.</p> <p> It&#39;s unsurprising, really, that, as couples who&#39;ve both been together for some time, each pair came up with lists that were more or less identical. And 2006 wasn&#39;t the best of all possible years for any of us.</p>

<p> #+:CAPTION: A few minutes before midnight, 2006-12-31 <img src="../newyears.jpg" alt="../newyears.jpg" title="../newyears.jpg" /></p>

<p> Well, I&#39;m sure not going to blog about Saddam Hussein, and I&#39;ve <a href="http://www.tendentious.org/food/pho_cali">already blogged about</a> the Vietnamese restaurant we went to yesterday, and while an amusing experience, the hispanic supermarket we went to yesterday:<a href="http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/">http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/</a> wasn&#39;t <em>that</em> earth-shattering (having been to one of the Fiestas in Houston, it&#39;s pretty small potatoes, really).</p> <p> And I&#39;m otherwise occupied with making tortilla using <a href="http://soup.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/Tortilla_Soup/2168">this Cook&#39;s Illustrated recipe</a> (warning, it&#39;s behind a membership firewall, but you can find a copy someone&#39;s put on the web <a href="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~seck/kitchen/tortilla_soup.htm)">here</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://tytso.livejournal.com/--better">Ted Tso</a> known as a Linux kernel hacker–documents a way to do <em>sous vide</em> cooking using a slow cooker.</p> <p> This is the technique that you occasionally see on <em>Iron Chef America</em>, using special units that heat and circulate water at very precise temperatures. Using a slow cooker makes it a bit more accessible as a technique.</p> <p> Funny enough, I seem to have just gotten one of those for Xmas…</p>

<p> I&#39;ve decided to get rid of a lot of books. Mostly, but probably not exclusively, technical books. Many, but not all, fairly up to date. The fact is that for years I&#39;ve bought them simply out of habit–I browse them, or maybe even actually sit down and read them, and discover that there&#39;s little in them that I didn&#39;t already know. And then they go on the bookshelves, or the floor, and take up space.</p>

<p> I was involved in the prior discussion while at a performance by <a href="http://www.myspace.com/thewatercallers">The Water Callers</a>, a local pair. If you go to the myspace page, I would suggest you listen to <em>In The Moonlight</em>, which I think is the best of the tracks they&#39;ve got posted, though not the best they&#39;ve written.</p> <p> It was fun, even if it does end up with me posting this after midnight. We saw a number of people from the kula there, some expected, some not. I don&#39;t think we&#39;ve been as likely to run into people we know out of the blue since living in Tuscaloosa.</p>

<p> I was just present for a discussion of a production of <em>A Streetcar Named Desire</em>.</p> <p> With zombies.</p> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> <img src="/2006/12/29/1.png" alt="/2006/12/29/1.png" title="/2006/12/29/1.png" /> I truly have been busy as hell the last few days. It&#39;s a pretty good sort of busy, I suppose–I&#39;ve rewritten huge chunks of code (we now no longer have a stand-alone spam checking daemon, it&#39;s instead managed through postfix, which makes a certain sort of sense), implemented a number of new independent processes, etc.</p> <p> And that&#39;s just what&#39;s happening in my little <strong>intense development</strong> branch; Chris and Dad have been working away on web stuff, with me providing the occasional prod to keep them on course.</p>

<p> I have decided to get out of not only the blog-software-writing habit (a bad tendency anyway, and one I never really had the spare time to give proper attention), but out of the blog-software-hosting gig.</p> <p> I&#39;ve got all the old posts imported (ah, beloved perl, an hour to hack together something to convert 500-odd posts), and I&#39;ll be redirecting the URL to typepad shortly.</p>

<p> was moblogging capabilities. Typepad even provides a Treo app to facilitate it. This is the obligatory test.</p>

<p> What if <a href="http://www.whatspop.com/blog/2006/11/glancing-alternative-song-structures.cfm">your song lyrics were a state machine?</a></p>

<p> I finally post the first item here in, what, three months, and the next day things come down the pike that virtually guarantee I won&#39;t have a lot of time for the next however-long.</p> <p> All I will say that if that old saw about &#34;When a door closes, a window opens.&#34; is true, I&#39;m the guy whose efforts to open the window just went from vigorous to mildly frantic.</p>

<p> Although I&#39;ve not succeeded in catching a broadcast in a long time, I maintain a great deal of affection for NPR&#39;s <a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/"><em>Wait, Wait… Don&#39;t Tell Me!</em></a>. As a result, when I was in <a href="http://quailridgebooks.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp">Quail Ridge Books</a> on Friday–it being perhaps not entirely surprising that the onset of the Christmas season tends to drive me more to local retailers, even though I&#39;m generally content to browse at Barnes &amp; Noble most of the time–I picked up (among other things), <a href="http://fanaticalapathy.org/&#39;s">Adam Felber</a> <em>Schroedinger&#39;s Ball</em>.</p>

<p> OK, so guest starring on ER would have hardly been a significant feather in his cap, but oh how it hurts to hear that Andre Braugher turned that down to <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=3&amp;amp;id=37645">be in the second Fantastic Four movie</a>.</p> <p> I rented the first one, and still felt a bit cheated. I can&#39;t imagine the second would be any better. But who know, I suppose they could really pull out the stops and Do Galactus Right.</p>

<p> Over at <a href="http://highclearing.com/">Unqualified Offerings</a>, Jim Henly has, first, <a href="http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/08/24/5428">a solution</a> for when your 17-year-old wants his girlfriend to sleep over. Best of all, it should be fun for the parents in a number of ways.</p> <p> Second, he has <a href="http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/08/24/5427">the fortune cookie response</a> to neoconservative fortune cookie plans.</p>

<p> What a bunch of fucking slackers.</p> <p> No, I&#39;m not talking about their shitty reporting on the run-up to war, or their unwillingness to hold a crap administration&#39;s feet to the fire for what they&#39;re not doing for the American people.</p> <p> No, right now I&#39;m talking about unattributed theft of text from Wikipedia. To wit (from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus_in_fetu">the Fetus In Fetu</a> article on WP):</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Fetus in fetu</em> (or Foetus in foeto) describes an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin&#39;s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.</p>

<p> So, apparently Christopher Nolan is almost on board to <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=3&amp;amp;id=37460">direct a movie version of <em>The Prisoner</em></a>.</p> <p> Now I don&#39;t really remember much about the original show–even though MTV rebroadcast it while I was in college (I had no TV, and, honestly, I really didn&#39;t miss it)–but the lasting impression I have is one of a show playing &#34;hide the ball&#34; with important bits of information to the point of incoherence. While I don&#39;t mind that <em>per se</em>–and maybe it wouldn&#39;t have seemed so had the show not had a very short run, meaning they perhaps weren&#39;t able to explain things they intended to later–I have to wonder how that would play with mainstream movie audiences.</p>

<p> Given my repeated and persistent absences from posting, it should come as little surprise that I also haven&#39;t bothered to look at my web stats either. Given that this whole edifice is about my narcissistic need to make my snappy patter available to the web, how could it not hurt to find out that my never-exactly-legion fans had abandoned me?</p> <p> Anyway, just because I haven&#39;t looked at them doesn&#39;t mean that the stats haven&#39;t been collected, and after a week of blogging a couple of stories a day, I figured, &#34;What the hell?&#34;</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&amp;amp;id=37442">Anthrax pays a surprise visit to the set of Battlestar Galactica</a>.</p> <p> With tracks paying homage to comic books (<a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/anthrax/i+am+the+law_20008482.html)"><em>Judge Dredd</em></a>, horror novels (<em>Misery</em> in &#34;Misery Loves Company&#34;), and movies (<em>Blue Velvet</em> in &#34;Now It&#39;s Dark&#34;), can a track dissing Cylons be far behind?</p>

<p> So, my dad and I have had a long-running debate over whether or not we should be including spam with so-called &#34;Poison Paragraphs&#34; in the corpus we hand-manage for <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam&#39;s</a> Bayesian database.</p> <p> I&#39;ve long maintained that the right solution is to just bung it in there–the text that is generally being inserted is generally far too atypical of real emails to make a difference. Dad was more hesitant.</p> <p> With this in mind, I tried to be gracious when he called to mention that NPR had <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624749">a story</a>, including an interview with <a href="http://paulgraham.com/">Paul Graham</a>, the guy who <a href="http://paulgraham.com/spam.html">first proposed using Bayesian analysis</a>, who confirmed that it really wasn&#39;t a problem.</p>

<p> OK, so <a href="http://squeedlyspooch.com/blog/">Chris Toshok</a> has apparently <a href="http://squeedlyspooch.com/blog/archives/002069.html">been dinking away</a> with making Turtle, which I gather is a GPS-monitoring package of some sort, hook up with <a href="http://f-spot.org/Main_Page">F-Spot</a>, so that, based on timestamps in your photos, you can pinpoint where they were taken.</p> <p> And then you can export the locations of the photos to google maps and the like.</p> <p> It&#39;s apparently all very much under development, doesn&#39;t yet work for anyone else, etc., and, for all I know, it may already be a feature of every commercial photo management package in the world. But damn, it sure seems like a neat idea.</p>

<p> At least, I have no reason to believe that the author of <a href="http://www.toool.nl/bumping.pdf">this paper</a> has any particular reason to lie. And the ubiquitous YouTube even has video of someone demonstrating the technique:</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WexoP5ZDWgg?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> Oh, hooray.</p>

<p> <a href="http://davyd.livejournal.com/">Davyd Madeley</a> hacked together <a href="http://davyd.livejournal.com/189538.html">a small GNOME applet</a> to measure and rate his contributions to the GNOME Bugzilla and set boudaries for levels and such.</p> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> As I was tooling around the UNC campus, playing musical subversive (that is, playing whatever mix CD I had in the car at moderate-to-loud volume in the hopes of making the lives of people I passed a little more surreal when things went from, say, <em>Beck</em> to <em>Earth, Wind &amp; Fire</em>), I came to a stop sign. At these points I usually turn down the stereo a little, and I kind of idly noted that this was probably a kind move for the older, almost elderly gentleman passing in front of me, though it was just <em>Dear Prudence</em> on at the time, so it&#39;s not like it&#39;s all that abrasive.</p>

<p> The Guardian, of all places (think: newspaper from cold &amp; dreary nation reporting on happenings in subtropical island paradise), has a story about <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0%2C%2C1834048%2C00.html?gusrc=rss&amp;amp;feed=10">the US DOA possibley fining the Hemingway House $200/day for its cats</a>.</p> <p> Having been there a couple of times, I know that I would not want to <strong>be</strong> one of those cats–there are 46 of them, and there&#39;s no real way even an institution can really claim to be taking care of them. Sure, they&#39;re putting food out, and I have no doubt that many of the part-time docents really do care about particular cats, but there&#39;s just not enough attention to go around.</p>

<p> Consider setting your TiVo to record <a href="http://altonbrown.com/">Alton Brown&#39;s</a> new show <strong>Feasting On Asphalt</strong> (there&#39;s no good link, sadly).</p> <p> I watched the first episode last night (I had recorded it on Saturday or whenever it first showed), and it was interesting–the discussion of how mass culture has impacted regional food and small establishments, how changes in the automobile did the same (listen closely for the comment on the &#39;57 Chevy Bel-Air), so on and so forth.</p>

<p> Apparently <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray">Tim Bray&#39;s</a> Mac died. While it&#39;s in the shop, he elected to use Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra 20. <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/31/Ubuntu">His experience appears to have been positive so far</a>, but the best line is almost certainly:</p> <blockquote> <p>You know, this has been said a lot, but it bears repeating: Apt-get is just so unreasonably fucking great. Why aren&#39;t we using it for Solaris updates? I managed to pull together the whole witches&#39; brew of OSS that makes ongoing go without ever leaving Synaptic. Oops, not quite true, I cruised past CPAN to get DBI and DBD::MySQL, but I&#39;m not sure I needed to, because when I got MySQL, I saw a lot of perl-related stuff go flying by.</p>

<p> ..it is entirely possible for me to view the whole Harry Potter business with a certain benign affection, even while agreeing with A.S. Byatt&#39;s <a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-byatt110703.htm">rather negative assessment of the books</a> (though perhaps I&#39;m biased by the fact that she <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,836250,00.html)">recognizes the skill in Terry Pratchett&#39;s work</a>.</p> <p> But mild affection would never move me to public declarations (well, aside from this), so I can only assume that <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=5&amp;amp;id=37356">Stephen King and John Irving feel something more than this</a>. What a world we live in.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_Type1&amp;amp;c=Article&amp;amp;cid=1153000221434&amp;amp;call_pageid=1105528093962&amp;amp;col=1105528093790">but what Ryan Bigge doesn&#39;t seem to realize</a> is that being outside the 18-34 demographic should <strong>help</strong> you you get the &#34;More Cowbell&#34; sketch–I mean, <em>Don&#39;t Fear the Reaper</em> dates to 1976, so it&#39;s only people who are at the top end of that demographic who are likely to remember it as anything other than a track that had AOR traction when they were 10.</p>

<p> Not about stuff like work and coding and so forth, but about trying to keep up with so much stuff.</p> <p> I purged about a dozen blogs from my reader yesterday, mostly political ones, some of which I had been pulling for nigh on two years. I find myself deleting <em>Daily Show</em> episodes from the TiVO unviewed. I am still reading <em>The New Yorker</em> from cover to cover, but it can be a bit of a slog.</p>

<p> So, one of my consistent gigs is working on <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a> for <a href="http://ironicdesign.com/">Ironic Design</a>. We use <a href="http://spamassassin.apache.org/">SpamAssassin</a> as our engine, but we (well, mostly I) have built a bunch of infrastructure around it that allows us to do high-volume, redundant, high-availability deployment for domain customers, present held mail through a web interface, so on and so forth.</p> <p> For the last 18 months or so, I&#39;ve been embarked on a big rewrite, taking everything we&#39;ve learned from having this system in production for the last three-and-a-half years and synthesizing it into a system that will run more accurately, more smoothly and with less maintenance and upkeep.</p>

<p> It&#39;s been a long running joke with <a href="http://mischeathen.com/">Chet</a> that if I am unaquainted with some particular bit of American culture–movie, TV show, what have you–it is because I was in Germany at the time it happened.</p> <p> In many cases, of course, this <em>is</em> actually the reason, but it eventually morphed into an all-purpose response.</p> <p> So, after Chet pointed me to a <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630stevie-sesame.html">Stevie Wonder video</a>, I ended up doing a little YouTube archaeology (which spawned <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630vh-zz.html)">another post from Chet</a> to find something I&#39;d always heard about but never seen because, well, <strong>I was in Germany when MTV launched</strong>.</p>

<p> I mean, I don&#39;t think anyone expected them to be gone for two months. But just for the moment, Fafblog is back.</p> <p> bq.. &#34;I always used to figure God would show up at the end a the world an beam me up to Raptureland in his magical funk-powered mothership,&#34; says me. &#34;But that was before he got eaten by Supergod.&#34;</p> <p> &#34;Serves him right!&#34; says Giblets. &#34;If God wanted to go to heaven he should&#39;ve accepted Metajesus as his personal lord and savior.&#34;</p>

<p> My parents were willing, and able, to pay for me to go to college, even though I spent four years doing what would certainly appear from the outside (and often from the inside) to be drinking and goofing off.</p> <p> I&#39;ll ruminate on what I learned in college, and how differently I would approach it now, some other time. Right now, I&#39;m here to note that the interest rate of student loans has been raised <em>35%</em>.</p>

<p> While I was working up in DC, Alex–my primary partner in crime–and I would often go to a greek restaurant a on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks down from the Senate buildings. I don&#39;t remember the name. It was not particularly distinguished in any way.</p> <p> Their spanikopita were kind of scary–they looked more like burritos, if you can somehow imagine that–but the had good gyros, and Alex introduced me to avgolemono soup: the restaurant made one that was just wonderful, especially as October wore on and the days started to get colder.</p>

<p> So, I had <a href="/2006/04/omg-wtf-holy-shit.html">earlier</a> commented on the premiere of Ben &amp; Jerry&#39;s <a href="http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=180">Black &amp; Tan Ice Cream</a> with some shock.</p> <p> Though I was uncertain of the palatability of a stout-based ice cream, I am mildly disappointed to report that there is, in fact, no beer in this ice cream at all. <em>Cream stout</em> is apparently just a bit of clever marketing to refer to the most horrifyingly rich–mind you, not a bad thing–sweet cream ice cream they&#39;ve ever done.</p>

<p> And as I had a damned hard time getting it to go, I&#39;m noting what I did here so that it might benifit myself and others. This is using the 9.3.0.X version of the 3ware CLI software–though it says that it&#39;s for the 9500 series of controllers, it&#39;s really for any kernel after 2.6.10: the 9500 controllers introduced a new way of talking to the controller, and the driver for the 7/8000 series was retrofitted with it.</p>

<p> Seriously, <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0088194/"><em>Streets Of Fire</em></a> is not too good a movie. This may or may not really surprise anyone, but I hadn&#39;t seen it in likely 15 years and when I stumbled across the fact that Diane Lane was in it, along with a positively young looking (though 29) Willem Dafoe, well, I decided I had to see it again.</p> <p> So I fast forwarded through most of it because, well, that&#39;s what it deserved. <em>I can dream about you</em> is still a pretty good song, but boy, just not a great movie.</p>

<p> OK, that may seem excessive, <a href="http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=180?">Black &amp; Tan Ice Cream</a> I love Guinness as much as the next guy (depending, I suppose on <a href="http://www.musicmademe.com/show_sng.php?d=98542)">who the next guy is</a>, but damn, stout ice cream? That&#39;s demented.</p> <p> BTW, thanks to Tim for introducing me to &#34;Ode to Guinness&#34; which is one of the cleverest songs I&#39;ve heard in years.</p>

<p> I&#39;ve been stuck in javascript hell for the last couple of weeks, and <a href="http://prototype.conio.net/">Prototype</a> has been a large part of keeping me sane. That people then write all sorts of extensions for it, including one for <a href="http://www.arantius.com/article/dollar-e">using data structures to generate HTML</a> is just great.</p>

<p> <a href="http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/28/rails-1-1-rjs-active-record-respond_to-integration-tests-and-500-other-things">Ruby On Rails 1.1 has been released</a>.</p> <p> Although I&#39;m not using it now–my current project has too much code that&#39;s always going to be Perl for me to consider switching languages–it&#39;s something I&#39;d seriously consider using for the future. It does seem silly that they just came out with a book about using it and then introduced a major upgrade, though.</p>

<p> So what did he do? He used it to take a picture of an ant that is so detailed you can <a href="http://b9.com/archives/000079.html">discern the structure of the eye</a>. Not that I needed to see an ant that closely, but damn.</p>

<p> since, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd">as everyone knows</a>, the concept appeared in a Larry Niven story in the 70&#39;s. But, I have to admit <a href="http://www.harpers.org/MyCrowd_01.html">the article</a>, online from Harper&#39;s, is kind of interesting.</p>

<p> While it&#39;s true that I love where we live, sometimes I feel a burst of nostalgia for Miami. It&#39;s especially true when I read about a an <a href="http://www.fairchildgarden.org/publicprograms/Chihuly_at_Fairchild.html">exhibition of Dale Chihuly&#39;s sculpted glass</a> at the <a href="http://www.fairchildgarden.org/">Fairchild Tropical Garden</a> (we have the map of the FTG that we got when we joined hanging up on one of our walls.</p> <p> Fortunately, GNOME guy Luis Villa was there <a href="http://tieguy.org/pics/v/Miami/Chihuly/">and he took a lot of pictures</a>.</p>

<p> Or, more accurately, <em>taught</em> about javascript at the ETech conference. And he has very graciously made both <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/sets/72057594077197868/">his slides</a> and <a href="http://simon.incutio.com/slides/2006/etech/javascript/js-reintroduction-notes.html">his notes</a> available from his blog.</p> <p> These are mostly oriented towards people who already know how to program, but haven&#39;t taken JavaScript seriously. I&#39;m definitely in that camp, and I found his notes to be a very clear, consise introduction to some of JS&#39;s more advanced programming features–some of which I&#39;d been exposed to already because of my spelunking around AJAX code, but I&#39;d just been inferring their use rather than knowing exactly what was going on.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney">An interesting article on coming back to things you&#39;ve fallen away from</a>.</p> <p> Although it&#39;s couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it&#39;s influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle–it&#39;s all too easy to draw in and ignore things–but it&#39;s also a learned habit.</p>

<figure> <img src="../ford.jpg" alt="../ford.jpg" title="../ford.jpg" /><figcaption> He was a little big to be a shoulder-cat </figcaption> </figure> <p> So, around 8:45 this morning, we had Ford put to sleep.</p> <p> It&#39;s been about three years since he was first diagnosed as diabetic, and just over two since he finished radiation treatment for the tumor that caused his acromegaly. The treatment wasn&#39;t an unalloyed success–though we never had them do another CAT scan to verify it&#39;s continued presence, his need for insulin never left, and there were other issues–but without it, his prognosis was closer to 9 months than the 25 we had.</p>

<p> <a href="http://blog.ingy.net/">Ingy</a> has produced a javascript-based templating engine that can actually use templates intended for the Perl-based Template Toolkit. <a href="http://blog.ingy.net/2006/02/jemplate_a_template_toolkit_fo.html">He talks a little bit about it on his blog</a>. The scary part is that this may have just made it much more reasonable for me to support both an Ajax-based and a &#34;conventional&#34; implementation of the AnteSpam front-end; no more having to maintain two ways of presenting data, etc.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t think most of these colors actually appear in nature. <a href="http://www.sauria.com/blog/2006/02/07#1473">Check it out</a></p>

<p> But as <a href="http://lquilter.net/blog/archives/2006/02/07/the-kindness-of-strangers">my friend Laura discovered</a>, in specific they can be pretty damn good.</p>