log

cd database

If you have software that relies on an online database such as CDDB, don't. Change the settings so that it uses a free, open CD database such as FreeDB.

Why do this? Well, because Gracenote are not nice people. They charge software developers to include CD-lookup functionality. (They offer a free option for developers, but if you use it you have to offer CDDB and only CDDB.) If you're an open source developer, and have no money, you effectively can't include a CDDB lookup function.

Lucikly we have the FreeDB.

If you use popular CDDB-enabled software such as Audiograbber, CDex, or Exact Audio Copy (among others), then switch to FreeDB.

usenet trees

The USENET hierarchy, represented graphically. alt.binaries.* is bigger than the rest of alt.*. alt.binaries.erotica.* is equal in size to alt.binaries.mp3.*. Italy has the largest number of posts for any non-U.S. country.

thanks but no thanks

You look familiar.

オフィス猫 (office cat)

Aww, buddy, did you forget it was casual friday? Don't you know the necktie is just another way for The Man to keep you down?

Congratulations, Japanese culture, you're done it again.

(If my machine-assisted translation above is in error, I am sorry.)

origami pc case, sort of

One my favorite geek porn sites, Akiba, has pics of a new cardboard PC case. (Other form factors available.) It looks nice; got that utilitarian chic look going. Should be pretty light. It is flammable, but it would definitely get the looks at a lan party. And forget the Dremel, you could mod thid thing with an X-ACTO knife.

hula girl

I recently saw a Honda Accord in the parking lot of my supermarket that had vanity plates that read HULAGRL. It was a disappointment of epic proportions when I peeked inside the car and saw no dancing hula girl on the dash.

who can tell me the atomic weight of balonium?

The Retail Alphabet Game is great fun for people who see too many ads. Or people who are interested in logotype design. Or people.

ntp for freebsd for newbies

Want to sync your clock in FreeBSD? I will show you how.

The daemon in FreeBSD 4.x is called ntpd. (The old daemon, circa 1998, circa 3.x, is called xntpd. You will still see references to xntpd in some config files, but if you find other instructions on the net telling you to run /usr/sbin/xntpd, don't.) ntpd reads its settings from /etc/ntp.conf, which by default doesn't exist. Create it and add:

server [address of time server] prefer
driftfile /etc/ntp.drift

This is all you need. If you want to add a second time server for redundancy, add a second 'server' line just like the first, but without the 'prefer' directive. For more options 'man ntp.conf'. The U.S. Navy provides a list of time servers.

Now, to tell the ntp daemon to start at boot time. In rc.conf add:

xntpd_enable="YES"
xntpd_flags="-p /var/run/ntpd.pid"

and then reboot. If you put ntp.conf somwhere other than the default of /etc/ntp.conf, then use the -c flag and add '-c /new/path/ntp.conf'

If you don't wish to reboot you can start the ntp daemon manually with:

/usr/sbin/ntpd -c /etc/ntp.conf -p /var/run/ntpd.pid

Check to see if it worked with 'ps -aux'.

Hope this helps. If you're using Windows, get started with 'net time'. Microsoft offers more detailed instructions.

the primes are a malicious bunch of numbers

An incredibly great article in the Village Voice talks about the magic of prime number theory and the Riemann Hypothesis. An engaging read, even for the layman such as myself. (Edward Lim does well to start the discussion with a nod to A Beautiful Mind.)

The only glaring omission was the glorious Prime Number Shitting Bear. Very disappointing.

these pop tarts taste funny

knight rider

I can't wait to see the Knight Rider movie. I mean, it isn't going to be high art, but I watched so much Knight Rider when I was little that I won't be able to help but crack a smile when I see K.I.T.T. turbo boost over something again.

Of course, all Knight Rider fans know that the best episode is the one where K.I.T.T. has to face off against the evil version of himself, K.A.R.R. I don't think you can talk to any child of the 80s and not reminisce about that particular episode. One reason, of course, is that it was wicked cool. However, I recently looked it up, and I discovered a second reason why: there were actually two episodes that K.A.R.R. appeared in. The first was Trust Doesn't Rust, and the second was the classic that most probably remember, K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R. (This episode is also the world record holder for Most Periods Used In The Name Of A Television Show Episode. Little known fact.) Delving even more into the minutae, in the first episode K.A.R.R is voiced by Peter Cullen, veteran voice actor. Check out his body of work, it is truly impressive. I've probably heard this guy talk more than my own mother. Oddly enough, in the second K.A.R.R episode the voice is changed, this time provided by Paul Frees. Why? I have no idea.

Here is to hoping that K.A.R.R. makes at least a cameo appearance in Super Knight Rider 3000. (Dear God please change that title.)

apple and universal

Apple can't buy Universal Music Group from Vivendi Universal. They agreed in 1990 to never enter the music creation business.

paul graham on programming

Paul Graham talks about what programming languages will look like in 100 years. An ambitious task, but he's up to the challenge; Graham is a 'real-world' programmer, and he's incredibly smart. As a bonus, it's really quite interesting. When some sheltered Computer Science PhD writes a paper on the future of computer programming languages it is usually painfully boring. I much prefer to read Graham's or Joel Spolsky's essays. (In fact Graham has a PhD from Harvard, but he doesn't write like it. I consider that a high compliment.)

Spolsky will add in management techniques and organizational-type points to his essays. Graham's will focus more on the theoretical.

One of Spolsky's employees at Fog Creek Software runs techinterview.org, which is now back from a 10 month hiatus.

nobody here

Just me.

oh, nooo! what if gps fails?

Wired talks about what would happen if GPS failed. A nice little blurb about the Global Positioning System, which is rad (to the max).

Worst bit of information gleaned: The next version of GPS, GPS III, is a long ways away. The first GPS III satellite is due up in 2012. :( If there is one postive side effect of the war, I hope it is renewed interest and funding in GPS III and we can get that bird in the sky a little sooner.

Thumbs up to the U.S. Military. Thumbs down to Garmin for naming one of their units "GPS III".

hey, can you bring crutches to a cakewalk?

The inimitable David Rees has produced a new edition of Get Your War On.

David makes some an interesting point about language in an interview done by Philip Henken of the New York Press. "Operation Enduring Freedom" is indeed awesome, David. So was "Operation Infinite Justice". Even awesomer. "Patriot Act"? Fucking Incredible. Nothing says American Patriot like unabated surveillance of all American citizens. Gives me the warm fuzzies. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is a particularly super-awesome choice. I'm guessing the ad wizard who thought this one up didn't give even a passing thought to the fact that the operation might fail. I don't want it to happen, but wouldn't it be hilarious if we never freed the Iraqi citizens? Or if they were freed but a dictator later took control?

Come to think of it, there probably is a junior advertising exec somewhere in the Bush Administration, some TBWA Chat Day reject just relishing the fact that he gets to apply his marketing and branding skills to military operations, to wars. Kind of makes me wish for a simpler time, you know?

i'll stake my pulitzer on it

I'd be quite interested in hearing what Don Bartletti (2003 Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Photography) of the Los Angeles Times has to say about his former collegue Brian Walski.

koalas are voracious readers

A guy i know named Josho is working hard on a new comic aggregator, and it is coming along nicely. Suggestions for new comics are added very quickly. It is called Koamic. As for the license, well, I don't know. As far as I can tell it doesn't have a license yet. :) Maybe you can suggest one.

the other network

Unfortuantely, I cannot make it to the screenings of The Other Network at the Knitting Factory this weekend. If you are able to go could you please post a short review? I am interested in hearing about it. The incredible number of funny people involved ensures that the funny will be brought in mass quantities.

full contact computer programming

I wish I was this good at programming. But I'm not. :(

What are the Waterloo students going to brag about on Slashdot now?

is it tea time already?

he drinks a whisky drink he drinks a vodka drink

What a horrible lyric.

So, Chumbawamba has an anti-war song out called "Jacob's Ladder (Not In My Name)". Listening to it now, it is closer to bad than to good, but I think Gigwise is spot on when they say it's a tad bit annoying.

The song was originally released on Jun 18th, 2002 on their "Readymades" album, then rereleased in December of 2002 with new lyrics and a decidedly anti-war bent. As Chumbawamba themsleves explain, the original was about how Winston Churchill "let 1591 ordinary sailors drown after their ships were sunk off the coast of Norway in WW2 by German battle cruisers [as] Churchill thought a rescue attempt might have alerted the Germans to the evacuation of the Norwegian royal family. [He] so ordered ships in the area to abandon the drowning men." While I've yet to research this extensively, quick Googling turned up no results that describe this scene, and in fact the first three results for "Churchill 1591 drown" are Chumbawamba links. Hmm.

The new version confusingly uses the exact same title. The instrumentation is the same, only the lyrics have changed. Oil, murder, brimstone, and 9/11 get mentions. Worst change: the line

A thousand lifetimes /
Left standing at the docks /
In the bar down in Whitewall /
They’re sure the boat won’t rock

is changed to

A million lifetimes /
Left lying in the sun /
In the streets down in Whitewall /
Dogs picking at the bones

Oh, Cumbawamba, bravo. The former actually makes sense, the latter is simply alarmist. No soldiers are going to die on British soil, and now that they don't have any of that pesky history to get in the way, Chumbawamba has no problem bumping it up to a "million". Here, guys, let me pen the lyrics for you for when you rewrite the song next time:

A hundred kajillion records /
Buyers won't spend a pound /
In the alleys down in Whitewall /
Chumbawamba sleeps on the ground

Most disquieting of all, though is why Sonic Youth is hosting a copy of the song. I can't explain it. I thought SY hated them.

Inspired by Metafilter, Pop Culture vs. War.

we have dolphins. we win by default.

Paul Ford causes milk to spew from my nose. Much good job, little dolphin.

outlook email limits

I am forced to use Microsoft Outlook at work, and, in a gross understatement, it sucks major ass. It is slow. It is a RAM hog (12 MB on my machine which only has 128 MB). For some reason it thinks "Messages" is "Messages with AutoPreview" and vice versa. Fulltext searching is a process that involves a trip to the kitchen for an iced tea.

However, the worst transgression is one that absolutely infuriates me. Outlook cannot handle more than 16,384 emails in the Inbox. Granted, most people will never see this many emails, but in my job I do. I can get this many emails in approximately 6 weeks.

So, when Outlook reaches this many emails, and your POP or IMAP still has emails to give you, what kind of error does it give? "Inbox full"? A friendly and informative "Cannot complete desired operation"? A pop-up with "Error" followed by a horrible retching sound? None of the above. Oulook responds by actually downloading the email from my POP server, then releases into the ether. No error message is returned. It appears that you have no new mail. Your email is deleted and you never saw it. You didn't even get to say goodbye. What the motherfuck is this? This is insane. Was there no QC involved at all? This is a showstopper, folks. I've lost emails this way, but luckily they were automated reports that contained information I can obtain from other sources.

If you have information about this bug, please comment. I've done a cursory search of the Knowledge Base and come up empty. I'm using Microsoft Outlook 2000 SR-1, 9.0.0.3821.

let's take a trip to the future...

The future, Conan? Yes. All the way to the year X, when the second Gulf War is over.

How does it end? Well, Josh Marshall shares an email from a source that describes 3 possible outcomes. (Frankly, I'm not sure that these are the 3 most likely outcomes, but I'll save that for later.) One is the near-total destruction of Baghdad by air, so as to avoid large casualties in urban combat, and another is a coalition entry into the city, followed by a retreat. The last and most likely one is a surrounding of Baghdad, sealing off everything within 50 miles of the city center. There is a lot more to this last option; I'll let you read it.

I was particularly interested in ID'ing his source, which i thought would be near-trivial considering the description he gives (career diplomat, U.S. ambassador to a Muslim country, studied at National War College). I've come up with Peter Galbraith. He's one of only two on that page with particular experience in Iraq. You can watch a video of him at the Foreign Policy Association. Anyone want to try their Google kung-fu on perhaps coming up with a different name? I think my guess might be a little off because Mr. Galbraith is still part of the NWC faculty.