<p> How to become a hacker? <a href="http://nat.org/2005/september/#How-to-become-a-hacker">Hack</a></p>

<p> So, my friend George just told me that his family has been selected to be a Nielsen family.</p> <p> Those who know him can only suspect that TV is about to get a lot…stranger and more obscure. I mean, this is a guy who rents <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0072979/">old John Waters movies</a> for fun. I had never even heard of <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0067893/">Two Lane Blacktop</a> before I met George.</p> <p> One can only wonder if the Nielsen people have any idea what they&#39;re getting into.</p>

<p> It&#39;s strange how you can have almost your entire CD collection on your ersatz iPod, everything no more than a click of a mouse away, and yet some things will go un-listened-to for long periods of time.</p> <p> So I put Michael Hedges on rotation for the first time in a <strong>long</strong> while.</p> <p> Some of it is, indeed, too new-agey for my tastes. But some of it resonates in ways it never would have for me before–there are pieces that remind me of Satie, which isn&#39;t something I used to have as a reference point. And some of it is more bludgeoning than you would think you could achieve with an acoustic guitar. The Rootwitch seems to involve beating the guitar within an inch of its life.</p>

<p> I&#39;m posting this to a LiveJournal account. I&#39;m giving serious thought to making tendentious.org a &#34;virtual&#34; domain–that is, run services on other machines, rather than taking responsibility for keeping them up on my own.</p> <p> Part of this will revolve around whether I can find services I like enough, of course–which is part of why I&#39;m posting this on LiveJournal. The other part, of course, is whether I&#39;m too much of a control freak for that.</p>

<p> So yesterday I found myself in an unfortunate situation–I had just spent several days doing a significant revamp and cleanup of a clients LDAP tree (to better support multiple-domain email handling, mostly, but it had accumulated several years of cruft) when the client called me in a tizzy because their WebDAV access–necessary to modify a number of their websites–had stopped working.</p> <p> Well, it turns out that Adobe GoLive! URI-encodes any (presumably, I didn&#39;t check) non-alphabetic characters in the username it sends over for authentication. But these usernames aren&#39;t decoded before they&#39;re handed to mod-auth-ldap, so the lookup fails because there is no record for &#39;foo%40example.com&#39;.</p>

<p> Without wanting to seem disrespectful of the upbringing I was given, I think it&#39;s reasonable to say that my parents attitudes towards food while I was growing up were fairly conventional, and maybe a bit shy on the vegetables.</p> <p> Not that I envy any parent trying to get their child to eat vegetables–there just seems to be too much substance to the cliche. Maybe it&#39;s just their bodies telling them what they need to grow, and protein is higher on the list, and fats are just tastier, making kids natural Atkins followers.</p>

<p> That is to say, when I&#39;m working on web stuff, I think almost exclusively in terms of what I can do on the server side–I have been known to use JavaScript to do simple pre-submission validation of forms, but that&#39;s about as far as I go.</p> <p> However, <a href="http://particletree.com/features/the-hows-and-whys-of-degradable-ajax">there&#39;s an interesting article on how to have your ajax-enabled site degrade gracefully</a> that uses the incredibly sensible strategy of shipping all your documents as HTML that works, if mundanely (what I&#39;m used to doing) and then, <em>if it&#39;s available</em>, using javascript to make them full-on-robot-chubby ajax-enabled masterpieces. You won&#39;t even enable the ajax capabilities unless that particular promise can be fulfilled.</p>

<p> Jim MacDonald has a non-comprehensive list of <a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006448.html">Things I&#39;ve learned from British folk ballads</a>. It includes such gems as Avoid situations where the obvious rhyme-word is &#34;maidenhead.&#34;</p> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t know why it didn&#39;t occur to me to wonder before, but apparently as of today, <a href="http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/archive/2005-09.html#3">Alex Chilton is still missing</a>. He lived in the 9th ward, one of places the levees broke.</p> <p> Fook.</p>

<p> …there are second- or third-hand reports that Alex is alive and well–or at least, was spotted in a bar in the Quarter on Wednesday, talking about getting out of the city.</p>

<p> I remember being quite happy on Tuesday morning, as it appeared that New Orleans was spared the worst treatment–not to minimize the damage that had been done to Biloxi and Gulfport or even Hattiesburg, but New Orleans is 1) closer to my heart, and 2) seemed like the place that held the most potential for going from a disaster to a clusterfuck.</p> <p> I was actually happy hearing that the worst damage in the Quarter, which had really seemed like it would take it in the shorts, was that a bunch of trees around the cathedral had fallen (incidentally, refraining from taking out a statue of Jesus).</p>

<p> It&#39;s ironic that Neil Gaiman&#39;s blog would be the place I would hear that Kepler&#39;s, an independent bookstore in Menlo Park that I went to not-infrequently when I was working the gig out in SiliValley, closed suddenly, since that is where I got copies of American Gods signed for myself and Chet in 2001.</p>

<p> Oh, man, that sucks. Just three years after he regained the right to use of his own name in his company (Moog having become a trademark of another company when he was forced to sell off the assests of his original company), he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Three months later, this.</p> <p> I would guess you have to have to be an afficianado of a certain period and style of music for Moog to be a household word, but you&#39;ve heard the sound of his synthesizers whether you know it or not.</p>

<p> Tonight we went to a wine tasting dinner at <a href="http://www.panzanella.com/">Panzanella</a> (featuring the wines of <a href="http://www.hanoverparkwines.com/">Hanover Park Vineyard</a>, which were quite good, incidentally, as was the food). We went with a couple of friends, but ended up, as one would hope, talking with the other people at the table quite extensively.</p> <p> One of whom mentioned, apropos of something that I forget, the existence of the <a href="http://www.babasword.com/writing/rapcantales.html">Rap Canterbury Tales</a>.</p> <p> I really don&#39;t know what one can add beyond the obvious, that the existence of such a thing is both delightful and horrifying.</p>

<p> Almost six weeks with nary a post. Nothing at all for July.</p> <p> I&#39;d love to have some excuse–that I was busy with work or something–but the changes to my schedule that did, in fact, happen are not actually the cause. I just haven&#39;t had much to say.</p>

<p> …in <a href="http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3235606">a Houston Chronicle story</a>. The story includes this paragraph:</p> <blockquote> <p>&#34;You know, if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody&#39;d go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways,&#34; DeLay said.</p> </blockquote> <p> Which prompted this exchange between <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/">Chet</a> and I:</p> <blockquote> <p>(11:13:32) Michael Alan Dorman: Shit, I didn&#39;t know you needed a $35K escort to get to and from the airport. That&#39;s gonna make getting to the wedding a whole lot more expensive.<br> (11:13:59) Chet Farmer: yeah, yeah, yeah. I got guns I can loan.<br> (11:14:22) Michael Alan Dorman: Guess we&#39;d better get the full coverage on the rental, though.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.monket.net/cal/#top">A fairly spectacular ajax-based web calendar</a>. I wonder what it&#39;s using as a storage back-end?</p>

<p> That is, it is only because of inordinate use of petroleum products to ship produce from wherever it might be growing that you are able to get tomatos (yes, yes, I know they&#39;re actually a fruit) in January in North Carolina.</p> <p> What you might not realize is that milk is seasonal, too.</p> <p> <a href="http://beantraders.net/">Bean Traders</a> uses milk from <a href="http://www.mapleviewfarm.com/">Maple View Farm</a>, a local dairy. When I walked into the shop on Monday, Christy, the owner told me not to be surprised if my cappuccino was a little less foamy than normal, because the cows had changed feed for the summer.</p>

<p> it&#39;s interesting to read an article on <a href="http://dvd.monstersandcritics.com/features/article_4717.php/How_They_Restored_Bambi">the process used to restore Bambi for re-release</a>.</p>

<p> You should know that you can see increased performance by making some small changes to your database schema.</p> <p> Specifically, you should run the following set of SQL commands on your bayes database:</p> <pre class="example"> alter table bayes_token drop constraint bayes_token_pkey; alter table bayes_token add constraint bayes_token_pkey primary key (token, id); drop index bayes_token_idx1; analyze table bayes_token; </pre> <p> If you are running SpamAssassin &lt;= 3.0.4, that last statement will probably complain that bayes_token_idx1 doesn&#39;t exist–in which case you should fasten your seat-belt because your bayes database is probably going to get a <strong>lot</strong> faster very suddenly.</p>

<p> Hmmmm, what to say, what to say. The picture James Bamford paints, both of the failures leading up to 9/11 and of the failures leading up to the Iraq war are depressing. If you feel some need to go over this material again–if, say, you&#39;ve been living under a rock for the last four years (in which case, good on you!)–this is a book you might consider.</p> <p> That said, this, like his last book Body of Secrets (and perhaps his first book The Puzzle Palace, though it&#39;s been long enough since I read that that I don&#39;t have a clear memory of the prose) seems to be in need of some more careful editing. Not so much copyediting, or even structural editing (in the sense of stringing things together in a way that makes sense), so much as redundancy editing.</p>

<p> I caught this listed on TCM, mostly because of it&#39;s proximity in the listings to The Ladykillers. I&#39;ve not finished it yet, but it occurred to me to look it up on <a href="http://imdb.com/">IMDb</a>, which led me to look at some of the external reviews, which led me to <a href="http://decentfilms.com/reviews/lavenderhillmob.html">this</a> review.</p> <p> Now I really have no complaint about an organization with a particular bent doing its own film reviews–as long as they don&#39;t mind me mocking them if I feel it to be necessary. And, in fact, the review is actually pretty reasonable, even if it does seem to contain some mild moralizing.</p>

<p> The combination of channel surfing and googling brings me to <a href="http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol7No1/unholy.htm">The Unholy Biblical Subtexts and Other Religious Elements Built into Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II</a>, in <a href="http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/">The Journal of Religion and Film</a>.</p>

<p> I wouldn&#39;t generally note this except, well, first, she was in The Graduate, and second, she was Mel Brooks&#39; wife for the last 40 years.</p> <p> Interestingly, in doing the inevitable searching around IMDB that one might expect, I learned that Richard Pryor helped write the screenplay for Blazing Saddles. This is not surprising, in retrospect, but I certainly had no idea until now.</p>

<p> It seems obligatory that I should note this, even though I&#39;m currently an inactive developer. Lots of people put in lots of time to make this happen, and as I sit here using a machine that is running Sarge, responsible for something on the order of 20 machines that run Sarge, I don&#39;t have much else to say than, &#34;Thanks.&#34;</p>

<p> On the trip to Atlanta, I took along Chuck Palahniuk&#39;s Stranger Than Fiction, a series of odd essays and stories. I enjoyed it, though it&#39;s not the most substantial book I&#39;ve ever read.</p> <p> But, you know, where else are you going to read about the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival?</p> <p> <a href="http://www.testyfesty.com/">Other than the web, of course</a>.</p>

<p> So I went to my cousin Ben&#39;s wedding in Atlanta. It was nice to see people, it seemed to be the ceremony they were looking for, boy, the suit I was wearing sure was hot, hotter than it was when I wore it in New Orleans in May a couple of years ago, etc.</p> <p> The odd thing for me is that it was the first wedding I&#39;ve been to that actually made me feel old. Not decrepit or anything, just…old. I think this is because this is the first wedding for someone I actually remember as an infant.</p>

<p> In honor of my cousin&#39;s wedding in Atlanta, I present to you <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cousin/">cousin</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wedding/">wedding</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/atlanta/">Atlanta</a></p>

<p> …the White Stripes discussing Nikolai Tesla. I don&#39;t know that there is a good way to get across the deep strangeness <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0379217/">of this whole movie</a>.</p> <p> &#34;No, I <em>didn&#39;t</em> blow a capacitor, Meg.&#34;</p>

<p> …to appreciate the hilarity of <a href="http://www.chrononaut.org/log/archives/000581.html">Notes toward an Infernokrusher Manifesto</a>, but it certainly helps, I think. I mean, surely this is funny to everyone?</p> <p> bq.. I blew up the plums<br> that were in the icebox<br> and which you were probably saving for breakfast<br> forgive me<br> I like fire</p> <p> – Dora Goss</p>

<p> I mean, let&#39;s be honest, Charlie&#39;s Angels isn&#39;t really a good movie by any rational standard. <em>But</em>, the image of Bill Murray and Tim Curry wrestling in padded sumo suits is, as far as I&#39;m concerned, worth the rest of the two hours.</p>

<p> I&#39;ve been a big fan of Umberto Eco since reading Foucault&#39;s Pendulum (which I really must re-read soon) in &#39;92 or so. I find his shorter non-fiction pieces incredibly funny, and I&#39;m fairly certain I own all of his novels.</p> <p> That said, I never actually finished The Island of the Day Before, and although I did finish, and even enjoyed, Baudolino, it was not the compelling read I had expected. Still, hope springs eternal, so when I happened across The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana just before we were going on vacation, I picked it up, even though it was hardback (and I was going to have to schlep it around).</p>

<p> Seems to me the Anglican Church was taking the wrong tack <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?category=0&amp;amp;id=31112">when denying the movie production of the Da Vinci Code the opportunity to film in Westminster Abbey</a>. I think they should have used the even simpler-to-understand argument that, &#34;It&#39;s an unreadable piece of shit&#34;.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t generally go to barbecues or the beach or whatever it is that people tend to do on Memorial Day, in large part because, well, my dad was in the Air Force from before I can remember until I got out of college–I knew too many people in the military to feel like a day meant to honor the fallen was a day you could really devote to fun.</p>

<p> I&#39;ve mentioned <a href="http://www.murkycoffee.com/">Murky Coffee</a> a couple of times before (but I&#39;m too lazy to link to it), but I was amused to see a link to them on <a href="http://wonkette.com/">Wonkette</a> that led me to the information that a) it&#39;s mentioned in Jesicca Cutler&#39;s &#34;novel&#34; The Washingtonienne, and b) their Arlington branch is hosting a <a href="http://www.wonkette.com/politics/personalities/the-art-of-jd-yezierski-105597.php">somewhat political photographic commentary</a> that also includes naked women.</p>

<p> Yeah, I&#39;m back. I don&#39;t want to think about how long it&#39;s been since I&#39;ve posted. I swear, baby, this time I&#39;ll post every day, just come back.</p> <p> No, I&#39;m not going to go full Ike on you. Not right now, at least. Instead, I will leave you with <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%2Farchive%2F2005%2F05%2F31%2FDDGM7C7THN1.DTL">an amusing quote from Jon Carroll</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>In my youth (and still, today, in Las Vegas), all the rules were available in advance. The nature of the problem was known. The solution to the problem depended on many variables, but the variables were also known. Many unexpected things can happen in poker, but none of them is that a Merkon Death Ray will turn all the cards into lizards. It is never true in poker that your only hope of survival is to steal the belt of the man sitting next to you.</p>

<p> <a href="http://r0ml.net/blog">and r0ml&#39;s blog is already pretty damned interesting</a>.</p> <p> I mean, from <a href="http://r0ml.net/blog/2005/05/03/who-is-a-programmer">universal software literacy</a> to <a href="http://r0ml.net/blog/2005/04/23/dieting">the fact that heavily-processed packaged &#39;food&#39; is much more expensive and not as good for you as, you know, fruit</a> in one smooth motion.</p>

<p> A play that derives from Brecht and features Emacs, the RIAA, Bill Gates, Slashdot and various others as characters. I mean, <a href="http://www.remixreading.org/node/489">wow</a>.</p>

<p> Jeff &#34;Skunk&#34; Baxter <a href="http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16730?">is a Missle Defense Analyst</a> Wha?</p>

<p> So, Saturday night we went to see Caesar and Cleopatra at <a href="http://www.playmakersrep.org/index.pl">Playmakers</a></p> <p> I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I read the play when I was perhaps 14, and although, honestly, I couldn&#39;t remember huge chunks of it–as in almost any of it–a couple of things stuck with me for the last two decades.</p> <p> One was Britannus, Caesar&#39;s Briton slave, obviously intended as a stand-in for a modern (which I believe would be Victorian) Briton, being affronted by the strangeness of other cultures. He is a useful and amusing foil for Caesar, though, as in this exchange:</p>

<p> Frankly, since I got back from DC, I haven&#39;t needed a lot of directions to places, and everyone was just jabbering about how cool the technology was, and I only have so much tolerance for such things for their own sake.</p> <p> Yeah, I know that&#39;s surprising.</p> <p> Anyway, I have to admit that I <em>am</em> impressed with things people are doing with Google Maps, especially since they put the sattelite images up.</p>

<p> But if you&#39;re using sveasoft firmware in your Linksys or other router, <em>don&#39;t upgrade to Talisman/Basic</em>.</p> <p> At least, not yet. It looks good–even this first release has a number of things that look to be nice add-ons to the feature set that was in the Alchemy series–and I&#39;m sure that it will stabilize shortly, but I blew two hours fighting it yesterday before getting it to limp along well enough to be able to download the last Alchemy release and put that back on.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t actually care for them that much anyway, but <em>Curly Wurly</em> bars are another thing. Anyway, I refuse to support a corporation that is so fucking stupid as to <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/jamesh/diary.html?start=191">try to trademark the color purple</a>.</p> <p> No, this is apparently not a joke.</p>

<p> After my dental surgery, well, for obvious reasons–well, obvious if I tell you they gave me a prescription for Vicodin–I was in no fit state to post, and then after that started healing and I wasn&#39;t hitting the narcotics so hard, I had a burst of productivity on the Great AnteSpam Rewrite, and then after that started subsiding to a more normal pace, well, the weather turned nice, and I started doing some walking to try and keep off the ten pounds I lost after my surgery–ah, the wonders of not being able to eat anything solid. I should write a diet book.</p>

<p> Need something to help keep the kids in line, since you don&#39;t have access to Satan, Hell, or even the milder &#34;making Baby Jesus cry?&#34;.</p> <p> Steve Loughran has the answer: <a href="http://www.1060.org/blogxter/entry?publicid=7AD93D71C1D3984AE33CF63B4D41D8B4">Cthulu for three year olds</a>.</p> <p> I especially liked the caveat, though:</p> <blockquote> <p>The hard part is striving a line between providing the minimum of lies necessary for total obedience, without reducing the child to having a deep fear of darkness, docksides, attics, cellars and the wind rattling the shutters.</p>

<p> Anyone worth their salt as a programmer will tell you that programming by cut-and-paste is always, always, always a mistake. You might do it for expedience, because reworking whatever you&#39;re cutting-and-pasting to be more generic might take longer than you have to deliver your result, but there is never a situation where it&#39;s a good thing.</p> <p> But the <a href="http://subtext.org/">subtext</a> language has a demo that posits the question <a href="http://subtextual.org/demo1.html">what if your language was built to handle all the issues for you?</a>.</p>

<p> Yeah, yeah, Sunday Flickr blogging doesn&#39;t actually seem to happen on Sunday that much. What can I say, though–calling it &#34;Sunday Flickr blogging&#34; creates <strong>anticipation</strong> of it happening, and that&#39;s all you really need for marketing purposes.</p> <p> So, for your amusement, disgust or apathy: <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/moustache">moustache</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/carnation">carnation</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/hendrix">hendrix</a>.</p> <p> Yeah, I&#39;ve got Hendrix (specifically, <em>The Wind Cries Mary</em>) playing right now.</p>

<p> …I guess my practice of yoga is really only confirmation. I had absolutely no idea (not, in fact, that I cared), but Laurette Willis, Founder of <a href="http://www.praisemoves.com/">PraiseMoves</a> assures me that <a href="http://www.praisemoves.com/ChristianAlternative.htm">yoga is likely to lead people away from Christ</a>.</p> <p> In fact, she links to <a href="http://www.macgregorministries.org/cult_groups/yoga.html">another resource</a>, that classes yoga as a cult, and <a href="http://www.johnankerberg.org/Articles/article-index-y_1.html">another</a> that has several articles discussing its incompatibilities with Christianity.</p> <p> You know, I am sometimes amazed that certain stripes of Christians are allowed to use computers because having to, say, type, distracts them from their necessarily constant focus on The Lord.</p>

<p> Sunday Flickr blogging was delayed by my dental surgery, about which I will spare you the details other than to say that I could really get to like Vicodin. How convenient that there are so many people on the Internets who would like to sell me some.</p> <p> Anyway, for your delectation, I give you <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/pho/">pho</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/gums/">gums</a> and <a href="http://flickr.com/photots/tags/tuba/">tuba</a>.</p>

<p> I&#39;m about to head out to Huntsville, to do some work for <a href="http://iemarketing.com/">i.e.</a> (bringing up a new server, shuffling a bunch of other stuff around, etc.), and I hope to get some <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a> work in, but I didn&#39;t want to miss the second installment of Sunday Flickr Blogging: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/turnip/">turnip</a>, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whip/">whip</a>, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/dalmatian/">dalmation</a>.</p> <p> Perhaps on the plane I&#39;ll make some headway on the several half-finished posts I have laying aroud in my head.</p> <p> BTW, the kid in the dalmatian clothes is amusingly cute.</p>