To WAR!
The car is packed, the house is locked up and everything is off. I have my map printed, my camera charged and my PTO scheduled! T-1 hour until I take off.
Almost time for War!
I went and saw The Dark Knight in IMAX tonight after a triumphant sushi dinner at Sushi Edoya. If you have not seen this movie in IMAX (or at all) GO. Full Stop. I also saw Wall-e the other day, it was really cute and the moral they crafted in there for the adults was really awesome.
In other news, I got my hair cut again as I’m about to go to the Pennsic War for a week. It feels really nice to have it cut really short (I went way shorter this time) and I’m sure that after a week in the woods I’ll be even happier.
It is also admittedly cute to see Nina learning to drive a manual transmission. She’s doing pretty well. Hopefully she keeps it up. I had meant to teach my ex to drive manual but always figured there’d be time to do it later. It helps that I don’t have to do much teaching this time around!
mutt and Gmail
So I have been using gmail more and more lately because one of my friend’s work blocks my normal outgoing mail server. I really dislike webmail interfaces though and usually use mutt(1) as my MUA.
I can use the Gmail’s imap service to read mail, but sending mail is the whole reason I am not using my normal @ub3rgeek.net mail address and it would be nice for the SPF records to match up.
By default mutt(1) uses sendmail(8) to ship your message off to the local MTA, which then takes care of delivering your message. Now I don’t want to smarthost ALL my mail through Gmail’s servers otherwise that would be the easy way out, so the quick and dirty method was to whip up a quick little python program that would act as a SMTP client in place of sendmail(8).
Bits:
- Mutt Config (muttrc and imap are the important ones)
- smtpc.py
# gmail
account-hook imaps://imap.gmail.com/ 'set imap_user=""'
account-hook imaps://imap.gmail.com/ 'set imap_pass=""'
account-hook imaps://imap.gmail.com/ 'set sendmail="/home/mernisse/bin/smtpc.py -s -h smtp.gmail.com -u you@gmail.com -p your_password -f you@gmail.com"'
folder-hook imaps://imap.gmail.com/ 'set from="mernisse@gmail.com"'
folder-hook imaps://imap.gmail.com/ 'set record="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Sent Mail"'
This is the important part (it is in the imap file in my config), this overrides the other account settings and sets my Gmail username and password for the imaps driver and sets the sendmail binary to my smtpc.py script, passing the arguments for ssl, host smtp.gmail.com, my username and password, as well as the From address. Mutt puts the To: addresses on the command line after all options, since that is what sendmail(8) expects.
You could of course use this to relay to just about any mail server if you like. I continue to set the correct envelope sender, as well as the Sent folder so that the Gmail web interface gets copies of all the replies I send which it happily stuffs into the conversation view.
Crazy year
So the year that is 2008 is basically half over. I will be 27 in a bit more than 3 months and I think I am finally starting to almost feel like an adult. The year has had its ups and downs, with the adjustment to living in a new place alone and the stress of the US housing crisis. I have recovered about 1/2 of what it cost me to keep the house, which isn’t optimal but it is a hell of a lot better than before when I almost hit $0 savings for the first time in 4 years.
Living alone is a wonderful thing, not that I didn’t enjoy living with a roommate and the girlfriend but it is certainly more limiting. I am pretty well settled at this point and it seems almost like it has always been this way.
I have about a month before I go camping for a week at The Pennsic War in Pennsylvania. I am looking forward to a week away from everything. No technology, no cellphones, nothing except a few thousand crazies in the woods with swords, women, and liquor. Seems like a pretty good way to unwind. After that I will be attending PAX ’08 in Seattle, WA. For my birthday I’m going to go stay with a friend in San Francisco, CA and hopefully catch SOMETHING at The DNA Lounge.
And to wrap 2008 up, I am going to visit a friend in Edinburgh, Scotland then hop down to London (England) to hang out, hit some pubs and see Shpongle.
Next year looks almost as crazy, with my buddy getting married and having a wedding in China, and my little sister being engaged and having a wedding in Australia! I am going to turn into a little world traveler. I hope to see Japan in 2010 as well! The thought of climbing Mt. Fuji (富士山) amuses me to no end.
If that isn’t enough to do, the new Top Gear, Doctor Who and Formula 1 seasons have all started. And I’m playing Metal Gear Solid 4, which in spite of the fact that I didn’t play any of the other games I enjoy quite a lot and am almost done with it
Off to watch Top Gear Ep 2.
Baseball
The boss suprised the team today at our weekly meeting with an invitation to a Red Wings baseball game. There happened to be a game this afternoon and I work a few hundred feet from “Frontier Field,” the stadium that my employer is a title sponsor for and home of the Rochester Red Wings. I think I’m starting to get this baseball thing a little bit. It is an interesting game, and the more I watch it the more I start to enjoy seeing it. It was also nice to get out with the team and enjoy an afternoon just hanging out and relieving some of the stress that has built up after the craziness of the last few weeks (months).
I did however forget that I was Irish again. I am sunburned something fierce.
BlackBerry reboot loop :(
So last night I went and cleaned a bunch of stuff off the crackberry, like midpssh, which the 7100t is too slow to really use, and a few advanced themes (like the Dimension Zen theme) which were also slow on the 7100t. I rebooted to finish the removal and the crackberry went into a reboot loop. Terrified that I had hosed the system up big-time I tried to recover it using the awesome howto on crackberry.com (http://crackberry.com/blackberry-101-lecture-12-how-reload-operating-system-nuked-blackberry). Unfortunately vmware-player on linux takes too long to detect the USB device that I couldn’t interrupt the boot process and re-flash the device. Thankfully vmware on the Mac was quick enough to blow the OS back on.
Now to restore all my settings and themes…
Roadrunner and IPv6?
So I was at my buddy’s house and he has Roadrunner hooked up to an Apple Airport Extreme and I just noticed that my last login to my colocated server at the Frontier CyberCenter was from a IPv6 IP. The EUI-64 part matches my laptop’s MAC address. The prefix isn’t familiar to me. It was: 2002:4a4a:ca8b:0:213:2ff:feba:83cc
Is Roadrunner quietly rolling out IPv6? It would explain why my ssh(1) connections were flaky.
Edit:
Screenshot ftw.
Transclusioning Images without permission is bad, mmmkay?
Why do people think that it is ok to steal my bandwidth to host images for them? I guess this internet thing must be free.
Another dork thought it was a good idea to use an image off my website in their forum profile. http://forum.dzmusique.com/discussion-generale/se-separer-a-cuase-du-voile-t1298.75.html
Not only that, but it happened to be a 1280x1360px image that was being sized down to 100×100 by the forum, so each page hit was 350kb of data off my server. Thanks dude, how about instead you get a 680byte .gif called “i-suck-balls.gif”
For those interested, the following code block is responsible for this. Thanks apache and mod_rewrite:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} habboxforum\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} forum\.dzmusique\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/i-suck-balls.gif [NC]
ReWriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|jpeg)$ http://www.ub3rgeek.net/images/i-suc
k-balls.gif [L]
Why the computer should think for you.
I am tired of thinking for the computer. So instead of having to learn the gritty irritating useless internal details about every single piece of software I need to use I think it makes more sense to have a set of sensible defaults that work for as much of the user base as possible and then if need be allow customization away from the defaults to encompass the rest of your potential users.
A few (4?) years ago I wrote a RSS feed reader because I wanted to think for the computer and didn’t like any of the readers out there at the time. Similarly I have found myself writing things instead of using software that is out there for trivial tasks because the software that was out there was too infuriating, or complex, or just broken by design.
Working, as I do now, in an environment that needs to scale beyond that of the typical open source geek I find the short-sighted-ness of much of the community depressing. So much otherwise good software is written to ‘scratch an itch’ and is only engineered to work in the author’s basement. Scaling to a million users and many tens to hundreds of megabits/sec of traffic in a lot of cases is a huge headache where we have to work around shortcoming after shortcoming.
As such I’ve started to look for services that do most if not all of the work for me that I can just tap into and think less. The front page of www.ub3rgeek.net is a perfect example. That is 30 or 40 lines of python using the FriendFeed API to aggregate all the various stuff I do on the internet down into one easily manageable stream of data. I don’t have to think about sorting the RSS feeds, or tracking down the links, I just parse some standardized markup from FriendFeed and I am done.
More software needs to be written with the understanding that the user doesn’t want to have to think, that’s why we use the computer.
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue spec II
Everyone is probably talking about the latest installation of the Gran Turismo franchise, as it is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated, flagship titles for the PlayStation 3 platform. Sony and Polyphony have been jumping up and down talking about the improvements to graphics and playability over the previous versions, going even so far as to say the headlights in one of the cars has as many polygons as an entire CAR in Gran Turismo HD Concept, which was based on the Gran Turismo 4 engine.
Let me start off by saying that I believe it. This game is easily the most gorgeous game I have ever played, both the scenery and vehicles are amazingly detailed and smooth. If this is what the PlayStation 3 is truly capable of, then Sony might get 10 years out of the hardware.
So that said, first the disappointments.
- Interface – This is standard Gran Turismo fare. Not as irritating as GT4, but for pete’s sake guys, this is a DRIVING game, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make it EASY for me to DRIVE. I want to go into a race class (there are A B and C), start a series (Sunday Cup for example), pick a car and DRIVE. Going back to the main menu SUCKS. I just want to DRIVE.
- SFX – Guys, What the hell? I paid 40$ for this, $50 for GT4, $50 for GT3, and $50 for GT2 and the tire squeal (and most of the engine) samples ARE THE SAME. Seriously, Sony, Polyphony, You guys have some of the BEST minds in Japan, some of the most ENTHUSIASTIC fans, developers, managers, and marketers ANYWHERE. You have HANDS DOWN the BEST engine, platform, and franchise. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FIX THIS. If I could bring myself to use a blink tag, I would. This is UN ACCEPTABLE. My receiver is in Dolby Digital playing this back and it sounds THE SAME as Gran Turismo 2. Weak.
Ok, now the good.
- This is a TRUE Gran Turismo – The physics of the cars, the attention to detail of the tracks, it is all there.
- Control – I am using the Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel from GT4 and it is sharp, responsive, and the force feedback works just as well if not better from the previous game. I played through all of C class just now and am sweating and achy. It is a phenomenal sensory experience.
- 1080p, 1080p, 1080p – This is a reference title for the system. Just go into the game and leave it on loop. The scenery and automotive history shots it shows you while it idles are striking. The game engine renders all 1920 x 1080 of your multi-thousand dollar High Def investment and fills it with joy. It even plays random replays from the internet during the attract demo. You can’t really argue with that.
- Sound – The menu music is less cheesy and repetative, but it is still electronic lounge. The in-race music I have turned off lest it distract me, so I cannot complain.
- Cars – A good selection of factory (and a few tuned) cars to play with. I am an RX-7 fanboy and was overjoyed to see it make an appearance. S2000 and NSX fans will be similarly overjoyed. Of course Ferrari makes their Gran Turismo debut here as well. You can’t say anything bad about the interior or exterior modeling of the cars, they are without a doubt flawless. If only they had spent as much time on the SFX.
- Tracks – Stunning. Just stunning. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting on some of the tracks (like the High Speed ring coming out of the tunnel) really show off the PS3′s nVidia RSX chip. The people are still a little wooden, but at least they’re not 2d sprites anymore. The background scenery is absolutely picturesque. Makes me want to go to Germany and Japan VERY BADLY.
So, in short — if you are a fan of the Gran Turismo series this isn’t a bad buy. It is the first time the US has gotten a ‘Prologue’ but it was really worth the wait. I was originally calling this a $40.00 demo, but it could really almost stand on its own (for $40..) as a really REALLY good PSN title. But do yourself the favor and go out and buy the disc unless you really really can’t be bothered. It is the same price, but you get the movies (not included in the download) and something tangible to hold. The box art is kind of nice, and I bet the install and patch are going to be faster than the download.
Speaking of, the last thought I’ll leave you with is this: I am glad I didn’t get this on release day. The 400MB patch that came out with the game was atrocious to download yesterday (a friend got it last night), it was pretty bearable today. Sony should probably spend some time making sure their PlayStation Network infrastructure has a little more bandwidth and server capacity, the Thursday slowdowns when updates hit are getting a little old, and with all this new content and patches I am sure some users are going to get irritated.
If I were a game reviewer (and I’m not), I’d probably give this a 89/100 keeping in mind that it is essentially a glorified tech demo that we paid for. If this weren’t the preview, I’d probably score it much closer to 50.
catch up if you can
The last week or so has been pretty crazy. I booked my travel for my England/Scotland trip on Sunday, so I will be flying from ROC to EDI on 27 Oct, and then back from LHR to ROC on 3 Nov — just in time to vote in this year’s presidential election. I also converted one of my laptops to use dm-crypt for /home. Clearly this is not perfect and if someone wants to come and snatch the laptop while it’s on and snarf a copy of the RAM to find the key they’ll get the data, but that is a smaller subset of people than who would be able to get data off the machine without encryption. If you use Ubuntu of a recent version, I found the community docs here helpful. The system prompts me for a passphrase at boot now, all automagically. A real testament to the Ubuntu guys and all the work they do.
I have also been playing around with the new release of mediatomb and have been futzing with the new fourcc features to try to get the largest subset of avi’s working on my PS3 that I can — it doesn’t detect the audio type so there are still some that don’t work, and there is still that freaky glitch where Dattebayo encoded fansubs either don’t play at all or freeze after a few seconds. My PS3 transcoding profile now looks something like this:
<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<avi -fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>
So basically I transcode any AVI files other than DiVX 4, 5 XViD and VC1 video streams. I will have to adjust this a bit but until I find a command line app that can read the fourcc code without needing X11, that’s going to be somewhat tricky I think, it would be nice if they offered the ability to filter by filename / pathname regexes as well, maybe I’ll open a feature request.
In other news (related to the PS3 and mediatomb because that’s what I use to watch this stuff since I’m too cheap to pay for cable/sat) the Formula 1 season started last weekend. I can’t wait to see how this season turns out. The three-way grudge match between Alonso, Räikkönen, and Hamilton will be killer to watch, not to mention the up and coming challanges from the Red Bull & Toro Rosso teams as well as Honda and Super Aguri. Another exciting year begins!
Silly things amuse me, but global is the future.
I’ve been a Sprint PCS customer for 7 years, ever since I heard Emmanuel Goldstein on Off The Hook talk about this new “digital” cellphone tech. Their service has always been outstanding, clear and reliable. Their customer service has always been good to me, but I admit I have heard some horror stories from friends about botched bills, messed up service, lost replacement phones, etc. Of course, their service is based on the CDMA technology, which is an all-digital cellular telephone system that unfortunately is used… in the United States… and not really anywhere else. There are a few carriers in Canada, but service is spotty at best, and roaming charges are just scary. Japan uses a CDMA standard, but it is not compatible with the US standard.
Today I finally cancelled my account with Sprint, as I have switched over to T-Mobile. The only real reason is because T-Mobile uses GSM. GSM is the Global Standard for Mobile communications, most countries these days use GSM, according to the GSMA, the association that promotes GSM, over 212 countries and 2 billion people use GSM phones. It is probably most famous in the US for coming up with SMS, the Short Message Service that most people these days know as ‘txting’. But the big draw for me is that I can take my GSM Blackberry nearly anywhere in the world and at the very least be able to make voice calls and send and receive SMS messages. This is literally as easy as switching out the little SIM card from the back of my phone. I already have a O2 SIM, which is good for service in the UK and most amusingly a UK phone number.
I guess I’m most excited about finally getting to travel. I really really hope I can make this a regular thing. This is such a wide wonderful world, it would be such a shame to die without seeing any of it. If I can manage to visit the UK in 2008, I’d like to see Ireland in 2009. It would be rocking to get to see Japan, but that is a level of culture shock that might just drive me insane!
History is important, change is good too!
Many years ago (circa 2002) I had a little website with two copies of b2 running on it. I had hacked the crap out of one of them to make a dynamically generated news page (archive.org link), the other was running as sort of a more journally setup. I have been meaning to import this data into wordpress ever since I moved from b2 but have been too lazy to actually make it work. So some hacking on the old b2 RSS2 engine enabled me to import ~108 posts from my distant internet past.
It’s cute to see how much I’ve grown the fuck up.
So to celebrate I went ahead and found a new theme for wordpress. It’s cute, kinda digg-esque. I’m not sure if I like it more than the old one so we’ll see how it goes and maybe I’ll go back. (if anyone actually reads the site, not the rss feed comments would be welcome!)
Sundays, and how I suck at this internet thing…
So it is technically Monday morning now and as seems to be the case I’m fucking wide awake and dicking around doing things that probably could wait until later. Like uploading images into the gallery, and updating this silly little journal of mine that from what I can tell only a few people ever actually read. I have slowly been picking up this social internet stuff, getting accounts at linkedin, facebook and even twitter! I am not sure that any of this is better than good old IRC and e-mail in my screen session that I can ssh to from anywhere on the planet, but alas it seems the world is moving along.
I am finally getting over this stupid coldthing that has been messing me up over the last week which means I can stop swilling down NyQuil like it is water… which is kind of a shame, for the NyQuil coma is precious and dear, even if it makes waking up neigh on unbearable. Most of the mates at work seem to be over the hump of this latest winter menace and I think my friend Nina and her son are doing better as well, she seemed very unwell last time I saw her and the poor boy had a bit of the sniffles too. I think the best thing would be for this damned winter thing to end… if we can even call this schizophrenic season we’re having winter.
The first week of shovelglove is over and I have to admit it is a fantastic system. It hurts, it tires me out, it gets me sweating and thrashing around like a dork and yet for some reason I actually look forward to doing it. I don’t quite understand it but I feel like I am accomplishing something useful and I actually look forward to spending time doing it. Hopefully that means I will continue doing it.
And I miss my poor RX-7, sitting all alone at home. It doesn’t help that I still have another 200 or so miles left on the break in period on the new engine in the Kia. It has been very emotionally trying not getting to use the entire throttle or RPM range on the car. Nothing relaxes and de-stresses me like the sound of a lightweight engine spinning at 7000 RPMs or more. Not to mention carving freeway on / off ramps at 2x their ‘rated’ speeds. And I probably could use some of that good de-stressing.
So the plan is to spend a week in the UK this fall with some of the boys, culminating with a live Shpongle show. Should be a good time on many many many different levels, not the least of which getting to finally leave this country for a bit and see what it is like out there, elsewhere on this little blue marble we call home. I think this Mark Twain quote is sufficiently cliche’ to sum up how I feel about this:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
–Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
As one of my friends mjw seems to say occasionally “hope on top”.
***mernisse opens his hand, showing his soul as it sparkles and brightens.
Shovel Glove!
So a few weeks ago Ukie of all people turned me onto a random workout that you do with of all things a sledgehammer, it’s called Shovelglove. Last weekend I went and dropped the scant $25 on a 10lb sledgehammer and once Monday came around I gave it a try. I am impressed with how amusing it is compared to other workouts I have attempted in the past and quite frankly I am amazed at how well it seems to work. My arms are very obviously sore today but I was still able to manage about 8 minutes (out of the 14) of fairly solid activity. The best part is that if it doesn’t work out and I end up hating it, I’m only out $25 — assuming of course that I never find any other use for a sledgehammer, which I find doubtful. I have never had a very strong upper body, so this should if nothing else help build a little upper body strength that might actually end up helping some of my back and posture problems.
New Year, New Resolutions
It is February and 2008 is very much here now. Looking back 2007 was no where near what I had hoped I could make it. I had hoped after the end of my relationship in late 2006 that 2007 would turn out to be a year that I would use to recover and improve myself. I was hoping to do some traveling and perhaps even spoil myself a little bit, build some experiences that I could look back on and maybe shuffle off some of the stress that has built up between work, family and my personal life.
Well, without going into details 2007 saw the depletion of my personal savings, building stress at work, and my optimism biting me in the ass again in my personal life. I can’t really complain completely though, I’m still here, I re-kindled some friendships that I had neglected and in the few little ways I could pampered myself. My more ambitious goals didn’t get met, but sometimes I guess that is the reason one makes the ambitious goals, it is the trying that matters.
This year I will set the same goals, to pamper myself, cope with the stress and to finally travel. There is a whole damn planet out there, and as a resident I must go see some more of it. I already pampered myself in that I have bought the most expensive thing I have ever bought, a Samsung 46″ 1080p LCD HDTV (LN-T4671F). It is gorgeous, and it appears to exhibit no overscan, which means I can now watch fansubbed anime on it without losing some of the subtitles off the edge of the screen!
So 2008 is already starting off with its ups and downs, but if I can set myself some ambitious goals I think I can accomplish them.
Happy Holidays, from the Electric Company
Well it looks like 2007 is rapidly drawing to a close, and despite the fact that it has been another unseasonably mild winter so far with the exception of the one winter storm it feels like the holiday season. I spent last night at Mom’s house and snapped a bunch of pictures, including the one above of the tree one of the house. The little Lumix did amazingly well and I got to play with it a bit in full manual mode. The shot of the house was a 25 second exposure with a f-stop of 8.0. I think it came out really rather nicely, since I was looking to get a nice glow effect off the lights.
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has a great New Year, 2008 can’t be too bad, it’s time to elect ourselves a new president so let’s hope that we actually end up with someone who cares about the people of this country and indeed the people of the world.
The dust, the dust, always covered in the dust.
You look so tired and unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
I’m trying to move the last bits of things onto my colocated server, and it’s not easy let me tell you. All the years I’ve spent doing this for a living has made me want to have cock-all to do with computers at home.
Of course losing my cellphone sometime after dinner tonight hasn’t put me in the best move either… stupid piece of crap belt-clip…
Anyway, I’m trying to be as gentle as I can be, but I imagine some things might be cocked up a bit until I have it all sorted, DNS is probably dodgy and I hope the redirects all work.
If anything is broken, feel free to drop me a line, mernisse at ub three rgeek dot net, or via comment, as those get e-mailed to me.
( as a side, m4a files can go jump off a bridge. My poor RIO Karma will play ogg, mp3, wma, flac and wav but not m4a, and transcoding them is more than I care to deal with right now… so I’ve got Radiohead playing on the PS3…. oh well, could be worse I guess )