Zingosphere
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Mitya000 and I collaborated on another Top 40 hit single tonight. I expect this one to break out into the mainstream. You can place it right next to your Susie Ibarra collection once we get SACD distribution. SXSW ‘07, here we come. Click here for a transcription. |
Bartering for Web Design Skills
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I saw this post on craigslist today, and I was compelled to act. I don’t know why I did this, but I laughed out loud several times when I was writing it. So, I have to think it has some comedic value. I used the occasion to test out Hencode too. I hope someone other than bumper finds this amusing. Read my response here. |
Secret Eating Obsession: Lay’s Kettle Cooked Jalapeño Potato Chips
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I love Lay’s Kettle Cooked Jalapeño Potato Chips like a postal worker loves to assert his authority on a citizen. They’re spicy, but not too spicy. Kettle cookin’ adds lots of extra crispiness too. This makes for a very satisfying snack experience. The famous Paul Hagan turned me on to the kettle cooked goodness of these old boys in early ‘99. We’d stay up until 5AM every night trying to exceed the accomplishments of Sterling Neblett. The best way to muster up enough energy to take down Sterling was to whack down an entire bag of kettle chips. I’m wanting to say we were eating Snyder’s because I don’t know that Counciltucky had their kettle cookers online back then. Oh, the good old days. Unfortunately, my metabolism isn’t what it used to be. Sitting around in front of a computer all day doesn’t help either. So, I have to bid a fond farewell to this epicurean pleasure. I’m quitting cold turkey. Don’t try to talk me out of it. |
Hencode
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but never got around to it until tonight. Enter some text into this text box, click “Translate” to see what it looks like in Hencode, a nonsensical alphabet of my design. Note: only letters, period, and space are defined right now. Numbers and special charcters don’t exist yet.
Run.rb
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This is a ruby script to parse through a Garmin Forerunner XML file and produce a brilliant bar chart. The information displayed is miles per week. It relies on rexml, date, and the gruff gem just like a kitty relies on milk for nourishment. |
Notepad Bug!
It has been discovered that Notepad has a bug. If you open a file using the program. Then, type in a four letter word, two three letter words, and a five letter word. After saving the file and reopening it, the text is garbled. Some combinations of words reveal the bug, others don’t. One example is “this app can break”. This fondly reminded me of John Hargrave’s infinitely excellent Notepad Rap circa 1999.
RedCloth Hoyhoy Bug?
I observed this behavior in Instiki which isn’t what I expect. I don’t know if it is a bug or not, but it kind of looks like one from where I’m sitting. I’m can work around it by specifying links directly (id=”#link”).
irb(main):002:0> require 'redcloth'
=> true
irb(main):007:0> RedCloth.new("p(link). blah").to_html
=> "<p class="link">blah</p>"
irb(main):008:0< RedCloth.new("-- p(link). blah").to_html
=> "<p>—p(link). blah</p>"
I would expect the red output to be:
=> "— <p class="link">blah</p>"
Update: Ok, apparently, a “p” tag is only valid at the start of a paragraph (at the beginning of the file or after a newline). So, I’m totally wrong which is par for the course. Thanks to the infamous John Whitley for setting me straight. I shall never again doubt ruby code from _why.
Information Received 2
Books:
Douglas Coupland: jPod
The R. Crumb Handbook
CDs:
Johnny Smith: Kaleidoscope
Tuck Andress: Reckless Precision
Gateway: In The Moment
DVDs:
Fela Kuti: Music is the Weapon
The Miles Davis Story
Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker
The Confessions of R. Crumb
Breaking the Law (of Hostname Canonicalization)
Mailman is a great little program written in Python that lets you manage mailing lists. I was tasked with installing it on a new machine last week, and I got to learn about canonicalization the hard way. All of the emails sent by our server out to the mailing lists were using the host name instead of the DNS A record for the Mailman VirtualHost. I tried for days to fix this and eventually got the feeling that it was DNS related. However, I still couldn’t see why Sendmail would force the To-header back to the canonical name when Mailman was setting it correctly.
Eventually, I happened across this email on Mailman’s dev list that solved the problem by removing one of sendmail.cf’s canonicalization rules. I’m sure this violates some RFC. Although, the hack does indeed solve the problem. The actual wizardry was to comment out the following line in sendmail.cf.
# pass to name server to make hostname canonical # R$* $| $* < @ $* > $* $: $2 < @ $[ $3 $] > $4
It’s absolutely wrong to do this because if you edit sendmail.mc, and restart sendmail, the cf file gets regenerated automatically which obliterates the change. Is there a better way to fix this without violating RFCs and changing sendmail rulesets? Note: I don’t have access to the DNS server.
NWCWG
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BJ and I invented some new abbreviations for instant messaging today. It started off with him suggesting RAYFL which is a kooky misspelling of ROFL. Often, he will use ROWFULL or even ROFFLE as alternatives to the ubiquitous ROFL. Later, he redefined RAYFUL to mean, “Ransacking All Your Fences, Unicycles, Levies”. I then added NWCWG to the lexicon as an abbreviation for Letterman’s ill-fated “Now We’re Cooking with Gas”. After that, BJ proposed TAEITR for “There’s an elephant in the room.” I then started to think of the meaningless drivel that people use instead of having a personality. We need to abbreviate those too.
BJ, then created some totally nonsensical ones.
Feel free to disregard this. It was all a massive mistake. (FFTDTIWAAMM). |
