February 2006 Archives

oh man, I want a poster of this: Largest Ever Galaxy Portrait
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So, I'm trying to play around with apple's Automator, to create workflows to do a few things I want. What I want to do is be able to select images in iPhoto, select my plugin, which will prompt me for a path, and upload to said path on my server.

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So I've told many people before about my old 'Curse of the Apple'. Well, it seemed to have gone away with the advent of OSX, but I had something this last week that sure made me feel it was back.

Saturday night, Kelly and I went out to the Clark Planetarium . We just missed a seating for Magnificent Desolation , but we were just in time to hit their new Black Holes . Quite a good show. Some great graphics that take advantage of the 3d-dome to help you feel what it's like to be at a black hole, the feel of passing the event horizon. It attempts to help understand relativity, in somewhat layman's terms, although I think it was glossed over a little too much.

They also made one mention of white holes, when describing the theory of the wormhole/bridge but didn't explain them at all :(

Overall it was a very enjoyable experience, and would recommend checking it out. For all my Star Trek geek friends, the narration is done by the guy who played 'Q', no biggie for me, but he did a good job.
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Since Kelly has become a 24 nut, I decided to give her this link.
The Jack Tracker

Nice little waste of time, some are absolutely hilarious.
Oops images
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I love the Olympics, but there are things that often irk me, usually sports that are critiqued on artistic levels by same lame judges. Still, I think the Olympics can stand for the best in sportsmanship and great achievements.

Apparently Bryant Gumbel feels differently about the winter games. Seems they aren't sports, or worthwhile ones, because there are no black athletes . Of course, it plays along with the 'no blacks are Republicans' mantra.. C'mon people, this shouldn't even be an issue.

Sure, I'll admit I really don't see curling as an interesting sport, worth my time. And yes, I think less of the grading of a lot of events. But I still respect what people put into them. And even if I dont' care to watch the judging of figure skating, I still absolutely respect their talents.
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So for work I take care of billing code, dealing with financial transactions. The kinda stuff you have to be very careful with. Well, while debugging some code dealing with a merchant account, I came across and interesting error code.

CyberSource error: Something REALLY bad happened. Your transaction may have been processed or it could have blown up. Check the business center to figure it out. Good Luck...

ooh, that's helpful. At least they wish good luck, because it's necessary. Thankfully this one was an SSL error, which was resolved quickly.
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After some difficulties I've been having with Postfix (mostly SMTP-AUTH), I decided to give Exim a try as my MTA. The switchover has been slightly painful, but much less than I would really expect. My biggest problem was with clamav not running correctly for a bit, but a reinstall solved the strange permission problems I was having. Those problems were actually from changes I had to make with amavis under postfix though, so I don't feel too badly about them.

I did have a little difficulty with TLS though. Didn't want to run on 465, and still doesn't want to do tls_on_connect for some reason.

I was just trying my first mailman setup with exim, following the README.Exim4.Debian, things seemed to have configured correctly, and people can subscribe, receive approval, etc, but not post to the list. Well, they can post but the messages don't get out :( Not sure why, hope to work on that tonight now that I'm feeling better.
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Finally back on, was out with a case of food poisoning. Darn Little Caesars hit me hard.
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I'll admit it, I've been previewing some different media front-end interfaces for home. I ran MythTV for a while, and while very cool, it's not quite what I want. Granted, I have some strange wants. First off, while I would love the nice PVR capabilities, I have a DVR, that works. What I want mostly is a nice interface to browse my existing media.

I played recently with the nifty little hacks that let you run FrontRow on any mac, and it's pretty nice. A bit heavy in some aspects (such as flipping through movies), but the interface is nice. Some creative usage of symlinks and I have my /Volumes inside my Movies dir, so I can get to my real content. I wish a closed system like apple would allow us some nice tuning of things like that. Of course, this is a hack to run on my powerbook, so I don't really expect it to be perfect.

Anyways, while searching around, I recently stumbled upon Media Central which has a rather familiar interface. It uses and FFmpeg backend, and has soem apparent plugin support. Just grabbed it, and will start playing with it. We'll see how it goes.
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An article by Frank Wiles was just posted to Perl.com about Debugging mod_perl Read it once so far, it's a great little article introducing two of my favorite tools for mod_perl , Apache::DB and Apache::DProf (both in the same package that Frank wrote.
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My most recent toe-tapping addiction.
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So a new site that I've been enjoying, and have in my feed list is Ajaxian . While I haven't been doing webdev for the last almost 2 years at work, the technology is very useful, and I'm looking at using some more of it both here on this site (my testbed) and at work as I get ready to overhaul the interface for our billing system. This has some useful links, and keeps quite up to date.
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Just saw that there is a new IDE for selenium , that is a firefox plugin. Very nifty. I'll have to check it out and see how well that runs. A better automated testing app for different browsers would come in quite handy at times.
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Congrats to the ref's in Superbowl XL for their deciding who they wanted to win the game, and making it happen.

What otherwise would have been a nice game was quite marred with almost every major play by the Seahawks getting penalized in some manner. From an absolutely beautiful TD, to amazing catches. Of course it worked the other way. When the Steelers finally got close to scoring, the refs gave it to them without even requiring the actual act of crossing the line.

Steelers played a good second half. Seattle had them locked down in the first, but you could tell it really got to them, when everything would get flagged against them. Almost nothing for the steelers though. Even with all that, 21-10 result isn't bad.
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So, about to head out from work to go visit my mom again. Yesterday I had to run out for a couple of hours to run my mom to the hospital. She has quite a few health problems, among them she is a brittle diabetic. Well, yesterday some neighbors encountered her, apparently low again, and attempted to revive her. When that didn't work, I was called in again. After checking her sugar, she was at 483! This from a hypoglycemic!

This is the third time in about a year that she has skyrocketed high for a non-apparent reason. Last time they blamed bad insulin. Well, yesterday we brought her in again, and all night she's been in ICU on their insulin, and as of this morning she was still over 380. What is going on?

So, hopefully in a few minutes I'll have some good news, but this is the 'delay' I mentioned earlier about not being able to post. Had some good rants too..
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Brokeback To The Future That's just horrible...
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I was going to write this yesterday, but some stuff came up (will describe later)

So the world is aflame over still over the pictures published in a danish newspaper. And low and behold some European newspapers had the nerve to reprint them. Most of Europe doesn't know what to do, caught between the the ideals of free speech, and multiculturalism. Anyways, I said a little on that the other day, but wanted to follow up with some links on the subject. Read more to get them.
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What do you do with an old Toyota truck? Put it to a real test of course..
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Snopes verifies the truth behind an amazing picture . That Dude's a stud. Walking away from that, and with attitude.
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So being a geek who enjoys cooking, I had to start coming up with ways to organize things. So for our spices, I bought some heavy duty velcro, with adhesive backing, put a strip along the backside of our pantry, and then on the backs of our spices. Thus creating a handy spice rack, that takes up previously unusable space. Kelly has hooks a little under them for hanging aprons and potholders, and I was trying to think of what else we could do to make use of the space, since it's a full size door, and there is a lot of room between in and the shelves. Well cooking gadgets has the answer, and now I'm slapping my forehead for not thinking of it. MagnaRack

Cox & Forkum have a nice comic making fun of the current uproar that some of the muslim community has about a danish newspaper doing performing the heinous act of actually drawing pictures of mohammad/muhammad/mahamat/etc.
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