August 09, 2006

Life

Stuff

Just configured Thunderbird on my notebook until I get my home PC fixed up. Two days, 1236 emails to my primary account alone.

Bleh.

For the past couple of weeks I've been tied up with some pretty blerky stuff at work. I'm supposed to be developing a whole new wonderful web thingy, and as soon as I got some momentum going I got dragged away to toil in the salt mines.

Necessary, but not fun at all.

Anyway, what with the long hours underground and all, I've been so exhausted during my daily commute that I haven't had the mental capacity to hack code on my notebook, which is what I usually do. Two hours a day without interruptions isn't something to waste, but neither my eyes nor my brain were inclined to focus.

So I've been listening to podcasts.

Started out with The Diner, which is pretty darn good for a one-man show. The triumph of technology and talent. Listened to a few episodes of the Glenn and Helen Show. They have some interesting guests (Vernor Vinge, for example), but also some guests I'm not interested in at all (John McCain). And, uh, how to put this... Helen's voice makes my sensitive Australian ears bleed.

Moved on to Hoist the Black Flag, which I think is on hiatus or something. That's a shame, because I think it's pretty good. Ace tends to ramble a bit, but in an entertaining way, and both Karol and Jeff make good co-hosts. Rusty also made an appearance, which was cool. Hi guys! (Waves.)

Ran out of those, and wandering about a bit I discovered that Hugh Hewitt is also available as a podcast. (Also Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, The Northern Alliance, and others I hadn't heard of.) Now, these are conservatives, in a way Glenn Reynolds, Ace, Jeff and I aren't. I'm a centre-right/libertarian-sympathetic/secular-humanist/futurist/otaku/geek/neophile. If there were a standardised left-right political scale (made out of platinum-iridium alloy and kept in a vacuum in a laboratory in Paris), I'd be off somewhere in the 11th dimension.

Hugh Hewitt's not so bad. I haven't heard anything really unexpected, and he has a good sense of humour. It's great to hear him tearing into the latest piece of idiocy from the NY or LA Times. Dennis Prager, on the other hand, I'll be listening and nodding, yep, yep, yep, where the hell did that come from? Except I know, really, it's just that in my world this puzzle piece and that one don't actually fit together, at least not without a bit of work with some sharp scissors and a pot of glue.

But - what was my point? Oh yes. What I really noticed is that the conservative talk radio guys sound an awful lot like bloggers. You're probably saying Duh, but I never really listened to them before.

Oh, and the other thing: Listening to conservative talk radio? I'm turning into my father.

Not complaining. Just an observation.

Of course, I get to skip over the ads and the more annoying callers. Which is most of them, come to think of it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:38 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Heh

I just worked out how to get my boss to buy me an iPod.

Well, I already have an iPod, but a new iPod. A 60GB video iPod.

And the funny thing is, it's completely legitimate and cheaper than the way we were doing the task previously.

iTunes remains the spawn of Satan, but I like iPods.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:33 PM | Comments (38) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 08, 2006

Geek

Hmm

Okay, burned a Knoppix CD, got home, booted up.

If you find yourself in this situation, get Knoppix. It works.*

The disk is somewhat dead. Not truly and sincerely dead, but not well at all. But I'm backing up my email right now, and if I can get that, most of the other stuff is already backed up.

* Mostly. It hasn't recognised the other four internal drives, three of which form a single 600GB filesystem. But they are intact anyway, judging from the Windows XP recovery function. Just means I have to be verrrry careful when I rebuild the thing.

Update: Okay, all the important email is backed up. If I lose some of my mailing list archives, not a big deal. The personal stuff is all copied. Yay!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:52 PM | Comments (849) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 07, 2006

Life

Here We Go

My Windows machine just died.

I wanted to transfer some podcasts onto my iPod so that I don't have to carry my notebook around to listen to them. Straightforward enough. iTunes wanted to be updated, and I haven't allowed it to do so for a few months, so I said okay.

Then it wanted to reboot, of course. Whatever.

After rebooting, things were not good. The machine was grindingly slow, Firefox wouldn't run at all, generally craperiffic. Okay, let's do a hard reset and see what...

So \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM is corrupted, huh? Well it was JUST FINE A MINUTE AGO!!

Now it wants my original Windows CD. That's something I have no shortage of, except that I need the one with built-in SP1 goodness, because this machine has a 200GB boot disk and Microsoft... Well, Microsoft are Microsoft.

Is it in my carefully-assembled CD folder? It is not.

Is it in the backup CD folder? It is not.

Is it... Well, there's not that many places it can be. I supposed I could look upstairs where the remaining boxes are, though the chance of my finding anything smaller than a water buffalo are mid-way between slim and oh, hello. (Update: Oops, no, that one doesn't have SP1 either.)

Well, let's see what it makes of it. Can't DIR the Windows directory, huh? Let's try a CHKDSK. Blah blah... One or more unrecoverable problems? You don't say. (Update: Which might be just because it's pre-SP1 and doesn't understand the disk geometry. Dunno. Probably not, since it could read the other drives okay, and they're larger.)

Yes, I'm grabbing a copy of Knoppix right now. And it's coming down at 1.8MB/sec, so it won't even take that long.

Update: Got Knoppix - just the CD version. Burned it to a DVD because I don't have any CD-R's, but it doesn't seem to think it's bootable.

Bleh.

I'll fix it tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 06, 2006

World

Perspective

Lebanon is smaller (10,400 km² vs 12,145 km²) and has a smaller population (3,874,050 vs 4,198,543) than Sydney.

Israel at 20,770 km² and 6,352,117 people is somewhat larger.

Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan combined are about the same size as the weapons testing range at Woomera in South Australia.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:28 PM | Comments (3742) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

World

Crapsprockets

Evil thugs throw my home town into the spotlight again.

More here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:24 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 04, 2006

Blog

Qana Conspiracy Theory

I left a few comments on other blogs on this subject pointing out various inconstencies in the story that indicated that there might be something other than just a tragic mishap.

As Ace notes, it looks like it was just a tragic mishap.

Maybe there was something else going on - but the evidence doesn't support that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:14 AM | Comments (54) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 02, 2006

World

Thank You, France

Maybe now we can get something done.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:28 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 30, 2006

World

Obsession

Via LGF, the film Obsession on Google video.

It's 77 minutes long, and parts of it are extremely distressing, but if you care about what's going on in the world today you need to see it. Even if you've been following the stories, you need to see it.

Update: Watch it all, too. The best scenes come at the end.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:33 PM | Comments (349) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 28, 2006

World

Say What?

"UN members reach Mid-East deal"

Uh, what? Israel has expressly rejected a UN peacekeeping force (not suprising, that); the US isn't pushing for a ceasefire, and the countries that are pushing for one are of no consequence. (France, for example. Spain.)

So what "deal" could have been reached?

UN Security Council members agreed today on a statement expressing shock and distress at Israel's deadly bombing of a UN outpost in Lebanon and called for Israel to conduct a comprehensive inquiry.

The statement, distributed to council members, is weaker than one proposed by China and other nations and is expected to be read at public meeting today by France's UN ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere.

Y'know, when I was reading Keith Laumer's Retief novels, I thought he was making stuff up, or at least exaggerating for the purpose of humour.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:50 PM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Weeeeee!

You can get a dual Xeon 5160 (that is, 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo) server from Dell with 16GB of memory and 4 300GB SAS disks for $10,000 (US).

That offers 90% of the SpecIntRate performance of a fully-loaded Sun E10K. (Assuming I've done the conversion right.)

If you happen to be looking for a compute node (say for a large-scale blogging app) and don't need huge amounts of memory or storage, you can get it for half that price.

Interesting point: The 3.0GHz chip is only $500 more than the 1.6GHz version. A dual 1.6GHz system is about the same price as a single 3.0GHz.

Oh, and AMD have responded with huge price cuts on Athlon 64 X2s. Not so painful if you bought one of the cheaper versions like the 3800+, but if you recently shelled out for a 5000 or an FX, ouchie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:47 PM | Comments (338) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 26, 2006

Geek

Cthulhu Fhtagn!

I've been trying to get networking functioning in virtual machines (this time, using Microsoft Virtual PC) on my notebook again.

Gah.

I've decided to just enslave myself to Cthulhu. The end result is the same - your brain and soul get eaten and you become a walking zombie fish-monster - but it's quicker and less painful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blog

New. Bill. Whittle. Post.

Must read.

No - need sleep!

Read first! Then sleep!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:04 AM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 25, 2006

World

John Howard, Zionist

The problem in the Middle East is there is never an attempt to bring about a long-term settlement. The fundamental cause of the current outbreak is the refusal of the entire Arab world to accept Israel's right to exist.
(The Age)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 24, 2006

Blog

racist scum, crusaders and wierods!!!!!!!!!!!!11

LGF gets email.

Satirists get depressed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:30 AM | Comments (128) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 23, 2006

Blog

Argumentum Per Absurdum

The argument from authority is a well-known logical fallacy. It goes something like this:

A: ... and so, from samples returned by NASA and spectroscopic analysis, we have determined that the moon is made of green cheese.
B: That's total nonsense. The spectroscopic analysis data is available here and chemical and physical analysis of the returned samples is here. And here is a bibliography listing over 700 studies of lunar composition, based on physical, chemical, spectroscopic, gravitational, electromagnetic, and visual data. Not only is the moon not made of cheese, it's not even organic. Oh, and it's not green.
A: What do you know about it? Professor Frink proved all of this in his book, La Lune Du Fromage. And he's got a PhD.
B: Yeah, Frink has a PhD. In medieval history.
But to take it that step further, what you need is something like this:
C: You "skep-tic" morons are alike. Professor Frink is a scholar and a gentleman, and his views on lunar composition are the talk of Helsinki.
B: Yeah, right.
D: Did anyone notice that C only joined the forum today, has made only one post, and is using the same IP address as A?
B: How about that. And get this - the IP traces to Frinktown University's Medieval History department!
B&D: Bwahahahahaha!
E: Having fun, skep-tic morons? Can't address the issue, so you resort to ad-hominem attacks!
The circle is complete.

No links. But you know what I mean.

Update: Okay, I said no links, but this theory needs to be brought to wider attention.

Update: Further philosophical insights into this vital topic of the day from WuzzaDem (thanks Steven!) and Riehl World View.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:58 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Another Victim

Of the demon that is Azumanga Daioh.

P.S. Pictures are borked.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:20 PM | Comments (1679) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 22, 2006

Rant

Feh

Not a DDOS attack this time; not as such, anyway.

We've been getting flooded with trackback spam, 2500 per minute at peak periods. This seems to have been causing Apache to go nuts. Or seemed to be the cause, at least. I zapped all the trackback scripts last night after rebooting the server after the latest Apache episode, and went to bed.

And then Apache locked up again.

Long story short: We're moving to new servers. That will give me a chance to rebuild everything properly, which is rather hard on a busy production server that is the constant target of DDOS attacks, hacking attempts, spam floods, and every other noxious event known to the 'net.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:54 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blog

Yuck

Last October/November, I built a statistical trackback spam filter called Snark. It worked very well, blocking about 99.8% of spam without requiring any attention from me, until its data files got wiped by accident during the DDOS attacks last month.

When I got Snark up and running, we were getting on the order of 10,000 trackbacks per day. Almost all spam, obviously, but Snark made short work of those.

In May, the last full month of Snark operations, we received nearly two million trackbacks.

So far this month, we have received four million trackbacks. It's gotten so bad that at the peak of a spam flood, just firing off a CGI script to log the requests was enough to melt Apache.

Yergh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:37 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 21, 2006

Geek

Duh

So I was scratching my head, wondering why my POST-Redirect-GET wasn't working. All I should have to do is to set the location header, set the return status to 303, and go. But all I got is a blank page, no matter what I tried.

...

Okay, yeah, it might help to actually set the status field rather than creating a new "Status" header.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:16 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blog

Banned In India!

And Saudi Arabia. And Pakistan. And at one point, South Korea. As Vinnie says:

Why couldn't we have been banned in Turkey instead? It would have saved alot of headache.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:45 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 19, 2006

Blog

Word of the Day

Condemnuum, n. A spectrum of activities which at one end would hardly raise an eyebrow at a debutante ball and at the other would make a hyena blush.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:23 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 18, 2006

Rant

I Hate CSS

To add insult to injury, the only browser that seems to work properly in this case is IE. That means my CSS is broken, of course.

Update: When starting with a "known good" version of something and attempting to develop a new system from there, it may prove worthwhile to verify that the "known good" version is, in fact, good. (Which it wasn't, though I'm not yet sure precisely where the problem lies. However, my cleanroom CSS doesn't exhibit the poopy behaviour of the borrowed CSS, so it's in there somewhere.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:33 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 13, 2006

Geek

Ick

Not to be using CherryPy for static files.

Well, they do tell you that in the documentation. It works just fine, and makes things a lot easier to set up. But it imposes the same level of overhead for static files as it does for dynamic pages.

6ms of overhead when a page takes 10 to 30ms to generate isn't a big problem.

6ms of overhead when a page takes 2ms to fetch from the cache is more of a problem, but it's better than 160ms of overhead.

6ms of overhead for a static file is... not so good.

So now I get to play with mod_rewrite. Because I don't have a live crocodile to shove down my pants.

Update: Oh look, mod_proxy isn't enabled. So I have to recompile Apache before I can use mod_rewrite with [P] tags. I'll leave it for another day, I think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:15 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

July 12, 2006

Geek

Got It!

Minx is now pie-ified. That's reduced the overhead per page from about 160ms to something like 6ms. Since a page fetched from the cache takes about 2ms to process, and an individual entry page about 12ms, that makes the whole thing just a little bit zippier.

Need to do some more bug testing and performance testing, but it seems stable in terms of speed and memory after coughing up 60,000 pages. With 10 threads, it uses 11MB of memory, though its virtual memory footprint is 114MB. Not entirely sure why it is allocating all that memory and never using it, but since the only real problem that causes is that I can't have more than about 350 threads running in any one Minx instance (119MB real, 2935MB virtual), I can probably live with it. And that only applies on 32-bit platforms anyway.

One thing I'm not doing right now is running with Psyco. Even in the worst case (cached pages), it gives a performance boost of 20%. But it also leaks memory like Netscape 4.5.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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