.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Frank

Viki
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
 
E-Commerce Stuff
I'm currently charged with the task of setting up some e-commerce stuff for f-magazine.org.

Amazon.com: Help / Selling at Amazon.com / Quick Start Guide

Google AdWords


 
The Wonders of the World
I found this site, Hillman Wonders of the World, a list of the top 100 and 1000 wonders of the world. Each wonder (listed by rank) has its own page, with pictures and images describing the wonder, and its place in history. I find it interesting that Antarctica is listed as a wonder of the world, but am pleased that it ranks 8th.

Some examples from the top 100 (AKA my picks):
16 - Forbidden City
30 - Qin Terra Cotta Warriors
71 - Kremlin
98 - Kennedy Space Center

Saturday, June 26, 2004
 
Dear Santa
All I want for xmas this year is a Pocket Bike. I tried really hard to ignore the impulse to possess one of these nifty little gems as soon as I saw the website. I did. I even didn't write about it for hours and hours in an attempt to curb my appetite for these sexy little toys. But the videos just kept looping over and over again in my mind, like I was there at the track, putting one of those tiny badasses over on the footpeg. I promise to be very good this year (well, within reason), and if you get me the bike I want, weighing in at just over 50 lbs, and barely making a dent in your pocket book at a reasonable $2,560.00, I will be even better next year.

Faithfully yours,

Frank "the Angel of Angels" Crist
 
Goodbye dictionary.com
I think I just found a replacement for dictionary.com. OneLook Dictionary Search is a dictionary search linked to 970 different dictionaries, has a cleaner interface, and, most importantly, doesn't have nine-hundred-billion banner advertisements up in my face. I'm sure that will change as its popularity increases, thereby increasing its bandwidth, and the need to generate revenue, but for now, it's the winner.
 
MicroAngela's Electron Microscope Image Gallery
MicroAngela's Electron Microscope Image Gallery. It's an electron microscope gallery of everyday insects. I really get off on this shit. If there was a show that just followed an insect around using an electron microscope to view everything, I would watch it for five days straight. The world of the "big folk" comes together just a little bit more each time I get such a closeup view of the microverse.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
 
The Spider-Man of India
Gotham Comics has a press release concerning the new Spider-Man.

Totally redesigned for India, this spiderman looks the same from the waist up, but has a kind of skirt and belt from the waist down. He wears roomy, high-water Indian pants, and has on Aladdin boots.*

I don't like the new design. While I enjoy the attempt at doing something fresh, I think it falls short. For one, his proportions are all out of whack. This guy would need a belt the size of a cumberbund to cover his waist. His dangling arms don't even reach his crotch. Plus, there is too much emphasis on the billowing cloth of his...whatever they call that top. I have no idea. But unless it is made to look like a third pair of limbs, the photos I see ultimately distract from the classical Spider-Man movements--limbs all a-gangle, stretching out hither and thither, flying through the air as if he'd been catapulted, yet strangely in control.

I hope they get these designs under control. It gives Spider-Man potential to become the best re-designed character since Batman became The Dark Night (or when Spidey became Venom). I just dread that they're way beyond their abilities here.

* Please note: I would call his new clothes by their proper names if I had any idea what they were called. Someone tell me.
 
DnD 2 starring Paris Hilton.
From the How to Make a Bad Thing Worse department.

Dark Horizons is reporting that Paris Hilton is being offered a role in the sequel to the all-time most shameful fantasy movie ever, Dungeons and Dragons.

From the article: "While it may have bombed, the sequel is drawing an unusually large amount of high profile attention and talent who believe that in the right hands, the property could still yield a viable film franchise."

And this involves Paris...how?

[via mefi]
 
Pulled over for Trespassing
So yesterday, on my way to work, I was pulled over by an Illinois State Patrolman on my bike. I had taken a shortcut (on my bike--this is on a bike, mind you) through a train yard because of construction on a certain street that I always ride through. The detour for the construction puts me six blocks out of my way, and I'm not that into my daily bike ride to work. Usually I just ride through the construction site (nice and carefully, I'm not a daredevil) but sometimes they're pouring cement, or lifting heavy things into the air, under which I would have to ride, and that doesn't make me feel very good. So occasionally I cut through an old trainyard. There's a bike path, then I have to get out and walk my bike over two sets of tracks.

On this particular day, yesterday, I took my shortcut and came upon two kids riding their bikes. I didn't say anything to them, nor did they say anything to me. I rode past them, then to the tracks. A train was coming from either direction, so I hustled across.

Unfortunately, on the other side, was an Illinois State Sherriff (or whatever they call them), and he started yelling at me. "Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing with those kids? You wanna get em killed?"

"They aren't with me," I told the cop, who obviously didn't believe me.

So he asks for ID, radios it in, all while being a fatass and smoking a cigarette. I just stood there and took it--he'd threatened me with a $500.00 fine. After it was all said and done, he handed me back my driver's license and a warning, acting somewhat chagrined.

"I just thought those kids were with you," the cop said. "They would follow your example."

"Ok, fine," I replied, "but who do you think is in more danger here: me or the kids?" The kids, I did not add to the cop, that you totally ignored and let go. "You should yell at the kids, not me."

"Yeah," the cop agreed, "I'm gonna wait around here for a little while and see if I can find them."

Yeah right. His fat ass was going to sit in his car and do whatever the fuck it was doing in the first place. He obviously wasn't there on patrol, and the train people have their own cops. Leave it to a cop to pull an adult out of a situation where a couple of kids were in greater danger.
 
My New Phone
So I just bought a Zyxel P2000W from my buddy Matt. It's a VOIP WIFI device, and, allegedly, I can use it to connect to open WIFI networks to be able to call anywhere in the United States or Canada.

The way I'm going to do this is to use Free World Dialup (FWD) to create an account that my phone will connect to. They then will bear the cost (or have the hookups) for giving me long distance.

The phone was $250.00 from Matt, a good price compared to the $299 - $349 range they typically seem to run in. It's slim, about the size of a long cell phone, but much slimmer. The battery should last 16 hours in sleep mode and 4 hours of active talking.

My ablity to use it around Chicago is going to be limited to the number of clueless fools that have left their linksys networks open, or those generous souls that have intentionally done the same. All I will be doing is hijacking a little bandwidth--not telco service--and you will probably never know I was there. I have wireless in the house, but it has WEP enabled, so it will be interesting to discover if the phone will allow me to use it over this network. My work has WIFI all over campus, so I'm bananas there.

The phone should arrive to me in the next week or so, and I'll let you know how it goes when I get it. Matt has them priced to sell, so if you want one, go bug him about it.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
 
The Hotdog Taco
So, I was hungry, and instead of taking off for work early to get a bite of lunch on the way (and wasting $10 downtown), I decided to rummage throughout the kitchen to find what was there. I remembered we had a pack of hotdogs in the fridge--rare, because my roommate and I never buy hotdogs--and I thought, hmm, if we have some bread, I can create a tasty hotdog in about two minutes. FYI, I am also very lazy when it comes to cooking and will unfailingly take the easiest route to food.

I opened the fridge, but there was no bread nor buns to be had in the mostly empty and lightless confines of the fridge. Drat, I thought, but proceeded to begin the microwave process for the hotdogs nonetheless. Slit down the middle so they don't explode, and, hey, what's this? Some gouda cheese! Excellent. But even better, hidden below the gouda, was a bag full of fresh taco tortillas.

Dare I, I thought, mix the all-Americana staple of the hotdog with the south-of-the-border flavor of the tortilla? With gouda cheese?

Hell yes!

The gouda was sliced thinly and spread across the tortillas, which then went into the toaster oven. The hotdogs were placed onto a small plate and shoved into the microwave for sixty seconds of irradiation.

Now the big question: what type of condiment do I put on a hotdog taco? Relish or salsa? Tough choice! I debated this for a moment while rummaging around in my pantry for perhaps a side dish, when my eyes passed over a can of vegetarian chili. Bomb! I would have vegetarian chili dog tacos. It was perfect beyond belief.

I took the hotdogs out of the microwave, poured the chili into a bowl, and began its process of de-lukewarm-ization. Man, there sure is a lot of chili in a 12-oz can, moreso than soup, it seems, because chili has a much lower percentage of water. It's like soupy dog food, flavored with TVP and kidney beans. Yum yum.

So I decided to just eat the bowl of chili on the side. And, what the hell, I slathered those hotdog tacos in relish as well.

De-licious.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
 
All Hail Luke Ma!
Hey, Luke Ma, some random guy on the internet, hooked me up with a gmail account in spite of my brazen whorishness. Thanks a lot, Luke! You the big cheese. Go read Luke's blog at blog.lukema.net.
 
Gmail invite
Hey, I'm looking for a gmail invite. If anyone has one, I'd be forever grateful. gmail@qaip.com

:)

 
Classical Authors Directory
The Classical Authors Directory, while far from being incomplete (Agatha Christie, but no James Joyce??), is an interesting resource of almost 600 different authors.

However, there are some deeper connotations that you may want to avoid, and not much is presented about the author of these pages (and these pages), one Mark Zimmerman, except for a brief snippet in his forums profile and, oh yeah, the book about himself that he wrote.
 
The First Stone
Lewis Wechsler, father of my good friend Nick Wechsler, just published his first book. The First Stone is the story of one white family that actively supported the black family moving next door and what that experience was like for them when some neighbors organized fear and racism and brought in the Ku Klux Klan, while others displayed uncommon bravery throughout the ordeal. Documented in Life Magazine and newspapers around the country, the book shares the details and decisions of each family member to stand up for justice.

(Thanks Laurie!)
 
Breastfeeding update
Randomly found the following top 10 list:

TOP 10 SIGNS THAT YOUR CHILD IS TOO OLD FOR BREASTFEEDING
10. He can open your blouse by himself, with one hand.
9. While suckling at one breast, he caresses the other.
8. He has developed a bad habit of flicking his tongue.
7. He keeps slipping dollar bills in your belt.
6. He uses your milk as creamer for his coffee.
5. Your birth control pills interfere with his acne medicine.
4. After each feeding, he has a smoke.
3. He frequently invites his friends over for dinner.
2. You feel an uncontrollable urge to listen to "Dueling Banjos."

And the number one sign your child is too old to breastfeed:

1. Beard abrasions on areola.

[via deaddog.com]
 
bush2004.com
Wired News reports that the geniuses that are running our government have failed to register Bush2004.com during an election year. The guy who bought it, Brian Rodgers, a former resident of George W. Bush's hometown of Midland, TX, bought the .com, .org, and .net extensions for about $8000 and refuses to sell them.

"He's a sorry son of a bitch and I'll do anything I can to bring him down," said Rodgers, who now lives outside Austin and is using the domains to house a satire site poking fun at the president.

My new superhero for the week.
 
Not a drop of milk.
So I was reading this article from the New Yorker about writer's block--a quite informative and interesting piece cataloging the history of the concept--and I ran across this paragraph:

Edmund Bergler, a Viennese émigré who in the forties and fifties put forth what is probably the most confident theory of writer’s block ever advanced. First of all, he coined the term. (Formerly, people had spoken of “creative inhibition” or the like.) Second, he proclaimed its cause: oral masochism, entrapment in rage over the milk-denying pre-Oedipal mother. Starved before, the writer chose to become starved again—that is, blocked.

Well, I thought, that's interesting, and I picked up the phone straightaway and called my mother.

"Mom, I have a very random question for you," I prefaced to her.

"Okay," she said, somewhat cautiously. Mom is not too terribly shocked by what I ask her about.

"Was I breast-fed as a child?"

"No."

She went on to explain that the reason for that was that it simply "wasn't in vogue" during the early 70's. She had planned to work after she had me, and there simply weren't provisions for a breast-feeding mother back in those days, nor was it talked about.

After a little more conversation, I still wasn't satisfied with her answer, so I rephrased my question.

"So, did I get any breast milk whatsoever?"

"Not a drop," she replied. I went on to tell her about the aforementioned quote from the New Yorker, and she added with deadpan, "Yes, I'm the great denyer."

After a little teasing back and forth, I threatened to go and buy some human milk to try to reclaim what had been taken from me--namely, the love and warmth that comes from a suckling infant taking nourishment from his mother--to which she responded, "Go ahead. You gotta do what you gotta do sometimes."

I took that to mean that she wasn't impressed. Of course, she wouldn't be. She was the great denyer.

[article via mefi]
Monday, June 21, 2004
 
Fedora Linux install (part 1)
Today I'm going to set up a web server for LAMP development using Fedora 2.0.

I'm a big fan of RH Linux. I've always used it (except for a brief dalliance with TurboLinux back in the day), and I always will. Oh, no I won't. Redhat linux has split off, I find from their website, into two branches: the Enterprise Edition, and Fedora. OK, well, I download the torrents for Fedora, and let's see how it compares to the original.

First thing is to use the graphical install. For some odd reason, I choose to do the disc check at the beginning of the install. This process consumes five minutes of time and tells me nothing new. I settle in for a few games of two-deck Spider Solitaire while I'm waiting. I lose them both and decline to check further media.

OK, next up is the disk partitioning. Damn. Now I have to remember all the friggin partitions and how big they should be. OK. Done.

Next is to select the desktop environment. I don't really use X, but I'm going to see what the latest version of GNOME has to offer, so I choose it. I'm also going to choose to have the installer install all of my software: php, perl, mysql, apache, ssh, ftp.

I see that it uses the highly sucky BIND/SENDMAIN combo for DNS and mail, instead of the preferred TinyDNS/qmail. I disable that right quick. Also, from the config options, I cannot tell if either perl or php are being installed. great. Plus, I can't tell which httpd is being used. Is that apache? who knows? Ok, whatever, I go ahead with the install.

Bam. Irrecoverable error. It seems that my 1GB allocation for the /usr partition wasn't enough. Ugh. Furthermore, when I try to navagate backwards back to the partition screen, I am informed that I cannot return to that screen (because the filesystem is active... ??? Uh, deactivate it?), so I am forced to, essentially, start over from scratch. Thanks.

OK. New approach. This time, i'm going to have Fedora install the absolute minimum to become a functioning linux box, then I'm going to manually install my development environment. This is what I usually do when setting up a server, but I wanted to give the installer a chance to fail, which it did in spectacular fashion.

On the second attempt, I give a much more liberal dose of disk partitioning, opting to not put /usr or /usr/local on their own partitions at all, and giving / 20 GB. However, when it came time to selecty packages, I noticed that the keyboard I had was all nasty. I started spraying it with compressed air and using a paper towel to absorb the gunk *shudder* that came out of it, only to have Fedora suddenly start installing things. Hm. Guess there's a keyboard shortcut in there somewhere to start the process. Oh well. On to the third attempt.

OK. partition. network. Packages. Let's see how it goes from here...


 
Hello World!
Index of /~acm/helloworld--the first program you typically write in any language, "Hello World!," in over 100 different languages, with explanations about how this one may be better than that one.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
 
Azureus : Java BitTorrent Client
So I'm switching from the TorrentSpy / BitTornado combination to Azureus. Well, I should say, I'm giving the switch a test run. Azureus uses the JRE (Java Runtime Environment), which, as anyone whose ever used it knows, sucks. However, I've got to do something about the cpu gluttony that BitTornado engages in. I can barely swap windows on a 1.1Ghz Athelon with 256MB of ram.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
 
American Rhetoric: Top 100 American Speeches by Rank (all)
American Rhetoric: Top 100 American Speeches by Rank (all)

Been around the internet before, but it's always nice to revisit. The 1960's take the prize for the most speeches (JKF is in there six times). Many of the speeches have mp3s of the speech.
 
Review: Margaret Cho's Revolution
I saw Margaret Cho's Revolution last week as a sneak peek at the Siskel Film Cener here in Chicago.

For those that don't know, Revolution is a stand-up movie along the lines of Kings of Comedy, except that instead of five black male comics there is one Korean female comic.

This review may contain trace amounts of spoilers. Consult your physician.

Margaret Cho fans will like it because it's a whole lot more of why they like Maragret Cho, in short: highly emotive facial expressions are sustained for great lengths (to the obvious approval of the movie audience); hi-larious gestures, nee, pantomimes, of uncomfortable situations (e.g. pulling placenta off of her forehead after her friend in childbirth's pussy explodes); lots of yelling and loudness; ethnic jokes about 1. Korean foibles, 2. misconceptions about Koreans, 3. endearing traits of her Korean parents; general fag-haggery; when not making jokes in a campy Korean accent, makes jokes in a campy ghetto girl accent.

Margaret Cho is funny, but if you've seen one half-hour of anything she's ever done, don't expect Revolution to venture into any new or more mature territory. Margaret Cho is loud, obnoxious, sexy and funny, but very repetitious, like Carrot Top, or Jeff Foxworthy. Instead of "stupid prop gags," or "stupid Redneck eccentricities," she gives us, "stupid Korean errata." Over and over again.

One thing that I did enjoy about this show was that she seemed to get a bit more personal with regards to her inner self; the "whys" of why Margaret Cho is ibid. Although I did not find it especially appropriate for her to seek to enlighten us about why she's an obnoxious and unattractive ethnic fuckup, it was interesting to see regardless. She's brutally honest, and you could tell that it was a heartfelt and authentic.

Her best joke was the "shitting her pants while driving" joke, which came in the middle of the show. It was a long joke--about twenty or twenty-five minutes of milking an awkward situation--complete with all of the Margaret Cho trademark humor. When she's up there on stage, wearing her flapper slip, telling about how she went on a diet that then caused her to spontaneously shit herself while driving to a friend's house one day, she is masterful at capturing the audience and bringing them along with her. However the joke is misplaced in her set, because nothing that followed came close to matching the intensity of that bit.

The last quarter of the set was mostly devoted to political posturing, largely among her core fanbase of gay and lesbians. It was in the format of "set up a political position and knock it down with a joke." I especially enjoyed when she talked about the "dont' ask, don't tell" policy of the military, lambasting the government for asking people to die for their freedom, yet denying that same freedom. The punchline, paraphrased: "We need gays in the military. How the hell are we going to win any wars without dykes?"

She wore a vintage flapper girl slip throughout the show. She made her entrance with one of those cleopatra hair pieces (think: beaded bangs), a princess crown, and thigh-high psychadelic boots, all of which came off within ten minutes of the beginning of her set.

I think Margaret Cho is hot, and I would totally hook up with her. Actually, we have a posse that would get down with her. Margaret, this is an advertisement. Call me.
 
Kitten-based flash movies
What's the deal with all of the crapy cut-and-paste flash movies, and why do so many of them involve kittens? They've even migrated to television, with the stupid quiznos subs commercials, and then spawn equally retarded things like the snapple ads with the anthropomorphic bottles.

I mean, they can be kind of entertaining, in an extremely low-brow kind of way, but they spawn so much other piss that it becomes easy for me to hate them in a generalized, categorical way.

Chill Out - Song by Youth Of Britain - Video by Rob Manuel & Joel Veitch (from mefi + 1000 other sources on the web).
 
#digitaldistractions
#digitaldistractions is a tracker with an emphasis on various tv shows, notably Dave Chapelle, Monty Python, etc. Damn, I love bittorrent.
 
The Manual Harddrive Defragmentation
Dr. Nårton, the "Datadocktor'n", provides a quite practical way to perform a manual defragmentation of a harddrive. Unfortunately, he doesn't provide us with any footage of what happens to the harddrive once it's attempted to be used after the, um, operation.

 
Fresh Goo(gle)
Fresh Goo(gle) is a burly way of searching for google additions based on date. I thought it was a part of google, but whois information returns a someone@yahoo.com address.

I ran across the coolest google logo I've seen:

 
Blog Dump
Added a nifty BlogDump interface. (That's the annoying floater in the top-right of your browser window with the iTunes feel.)

 
Educypedia, the educational encyclopedia, an information resource about electronics, computer, scientific and educational material
Educypedia, the educational encyclopedia, an information resource about electronics, computer, scientific and educational material

I'm doing a little writing project about the types of things that one might be interested in creating if they were, say, stuck in tenth century France, and it naturally led to all sorts of google searches regarding instructions on (e.g.) how to make quicklime from scratch, or how to make things like bleach, and disinfectant, and penicillin. The Educypedia looks like it might be a handy resource, even though it has a stupid name.
 
The Babelog
I'm not above posting a little prawn, especially not when it's Cunt Productions' Babe Log.
 
e-pauly.com
I find myself being often redirected to the blog of Paul MacPherson, a Canadian with interesting galleries.
 
Anti-spam solution
So this week I got madly serious about cutting down the amount of spam I get. My system specs:

Linux RH 7
qmail
tinydns

I already had spamassassin 2.55 installed, but I had never configured it. I had been stumped previously, via many complicated howtos, but this time I was just too sick of the spam. I get (got) about 300 messages a day from spam, so I decided to knuckle down and figure the fucker out.

So I found this page, which simply has superior instructions for the whole process. Most self-written howto's are either a bunch of commands with no explanation, or vice versa, however Roberto Alsina provides a great mixture of "do this" combined with "why you have to do this."

I'm not going to rewrite what he so excellently wrote in the first place, however there are some things still missing.

Custom Rulesets. The SpamAssassin WikiWiki has a page with various rulesets, however the real money is with the SARE Ninjas. These guys are the real die-hards when it comes to creating rulesets. I especially enjoyed their forums, e.g. this post (about halfway down), by Bob Menschel, listing his preferred config files, which I found to be an excellent starting point. Here are my SpamAssassin config files, in no particular order:

70_sare_adult.cf
70_sare_bayes_poison_nxm.cf
70_sare_genlsubj0.cf
70_sare_genlsubj1.cf
70_sare_html0.cf
70_sare_html1.cf
70_sare_oem.cf
70_sare_random.cf
70_sare_ratware.cf
70_sare_specific.cf
70_sare_spoof.cf
70_sc_top200.cf
72_sare_bml_post25x.cf
airmax.cf
antidrug.cf
bigevil.cf
chickenpox.cf
evilnumbers.cf
local.cf
weeds.cf

You should never use the sa-blacklist.current file for a .cf unless you are absolutely sure your server can handle the load. The thing about SpamAssassin rulesets is that they're just a bunch of perl regexes, and the thing about running a bunch of perl regexes is that they're quite cpu-intensive, and the thing about the sa-blacklist.current file is that it's about 1.7 MB of perl regexes that are run each time you get spam. I ran spamd with the max children set at 10, and instantly my celeron 333 with 256mb of ram shot up to about 3.5 worth of load. Luckily my server gets only a small amount of email, and I could kill spamd before things went catastrophic.

However, the blacklist is a quite handly little shitlist, so I went over to stearns.org, home of Bill Stearns, hacker and spam hater, as well as the maintainer of the sa-blacklist, and poked around. On the sa-blacklist page, I found this little gem that describes how to use the sa-blacklist with various mail servers, including my favorite, qmail, as well as some popular others (exim, postfix, sendmail).

Left todo whenever I get around to it:

  1. config learning cron job

  2. install RulesDuJour to keep my scripts updated


 
Posts test
How will the blog handle multiple posts on the same day within a relatively recent proximity to each other?
 
f a style sheet
I fn hate style sheets. Dunno why. They seem really handy. Yet I despise them; treat them with the degree of contempt that includes making absolutely no effort to learn them. However google blogs or whatever this is called uses them quite extensively for the templates, so I'm going to try to do something with it. whee.

Fuck that. I found the templates and I'm just going to use one that i can tolerate for now. I'll add links etc whenever I get around to it.

Powered by Blogger