06.19.08
There’s something fucking wrong with Canada
Seriously, if this judge is still on the bench in a month, I’ll lose all faith that anyone in Canada has sense.
05.28.08
As long as I’m posting random crap, how about eJabberD Install Docs
I had to write these for a colleague some months ago, and promptly forgot in classic fashion. Here’s something to mock my inability to write coherent install docs for posterity: Setting Up eJabberD From Scratch. A how to, of sorts, I guess. This was written for a Centos server, but is probably accurate for most Unices (don’t really know for sure.)
ConTEXT Erlang Highlighter
I just realized I never posted my Erlang highlighter for ConTEXT. ConTEXT is a free Windows programmer’s editor, and I’ve used it and MSVS basically exclusively for many years now.
Here’s my Erlang highlighter: http://sc.tri-bit.com/outgoing/Erlang.chl
05.24.08
IP data is stupidly expensive
Have you ever looked at the cost of something like MaxMind with monthly updates? It’s ridiculous. Tens of thousands of dollars a year. Makes me angry, honestly. Problem is, I went to hostip.info to get replacement free data, and one time in three it thinks I’m in Canada. (I’m not in Canada. Only Russians live in Canada.)
To that end I’ve decided that anyone who hasn’t checked (and if necessary, updated) their data in HostIP.info is officially a douche. It takes like ten seconds. C’mon.
05.20.08
Mod_rewrite not working?
Here’s what you forgot:
- AllowOverride All <– this probably says “none”; fix it
- AllowOverride All <– it’s in two different parts of httpd.conf, so fix it again
- LoadModule somepath/mod_rewrite.so <– uncomment this, and check if the file’s actually there
03.16.08
Resolving that annoying perl dependency
I’m just posting this up here because I always forget how to fix it and because it usually takes me 15 minutes to track down again. When you enable the CentOS web stack, perl is excluded - which is generally correct - except that dependencies require (currently) 5.8.8 whereas that is not provided by the base repos. If you hit that, you’ll get a message along these lines:
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package perl-DBD-MySQL
So, the way to fix that is to change the priority of CentOS Plus to 1 temporarily, yum clean all, install perl - which will get current, which is 5.8.8, put CentOS Plus back where you had it (presumably 2), and go back to what you were doing.
08.31.07
This guy passed the bar?
From Jack Thompson’s new temper tantrum at Take Two:
I want to bring to your attention the fact that at www.rockstargames.com anyone of any age can order Manhunt 2 and receive it, with no age verification whatsoever. Asking a 14-year-old if he’s 17 is not age verification, now is it?
How the hell is this guy a lawyer? Not only is that legal age verification in the United States (and, in fact, has been by precedent since the 1960s, when the issue was first tested by adult telephone services,) but also the Take 2 site only takes credit cards - which are themselves acceptable forms of age verification in the US since the early 1970s. Either the Florida Bar is obscenely easy, or Jacky Boy has been taking some anti-memory pills. That he should send that phrase on to the FTC and activist groups is so deeply ignorant of the law that it’s almost embarrassing to know who Jack is.
Jack, I write family-friendly game titles for a living, including family licenses from children’s cartoons. I want you out of my industry. You do far more damage than you prevent. Get it through your head: you’re a poor lawyer, a poor activist and a poor excuse for an adult living in a representative democracy. Stop flogging the bear: you may be a media whore, but the bear’s gonna turn around and bite you, soon enough.
And by bear, I mean “barratry.” Since you don’t seem to understand the law, Jack, please look it up (the various news blogs covering this are unfortunately referring to the COPPA decision; the COPA decision I just linked is far more germane.)
I greatly hope that the Take 2 lawyers will take barratry into consideration. This is the clearest case of abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in years, and that’d put a hell of a lot of weight behind the disbarment we all so desperately want to see.
08.16.07
God damned new WMP
Yay, windows media player pulled the only two things I use in the new version. Not only is the toolbar context menu that shows your library from collapsed WMP gone, but there’s also - get this - no way to look at your entire media library at once. Want to find a song that isn’t well categorized? You’re screwed.
There was a time when I respected the WMP interface team. That time has passed.
06.22.07
Done with AdBrite, permanently
Don’t ever ask AdBrite for clarifications of their terms of service. They’ll ignore repeated emails and phone calls for a month, tell you it’s ok on the phone but that they won’t say it in writing, then tell you you’re being abusive by continuing to ask, and that you’re risking getting your account shut down. (There’s nothing against what I want to do in the TOS; I was just trying to be a good neighbor.)
I just shut my account down. I will not deal with a company that is offended by a customer wanting to check if their idea is okay before doing it. Scumbags.
Anyone know of a text ad auction system other than AdBrite?
06.16.07
A side note, about gaming
Our good friends at DevKitPro want help exposing their project to a wider audience through the SourceForge Community Choice awards. DevKitPro is a deployment of GCC meant to facilitate development for console video game systems, including the Nintendo DS, the GameBoy Advance, Playstation Portable, Sega Saturn, GP2X, GP32, Nintendo GameCube and hopefully soon the Wii.
Some of you may know that I write Nintendo games commercially. DevKitPro and its antecedents were how I got my foot in the door. I’d like other people to know these tools are available, in case they have the passion too.
If you’d like to see other people able to make homebrew gaming happen for their consoles, cast your vote here.
04.17.07
Won’t be doing business with ModernBill
So, I tried to set up ModernBill for a new business I’m starting on the side. I hit a fairly serious showstopper bug, that prevents me from so much as adding a product. Eight days have gone by, and the staff hasn’t said a single word. Luckily, the product is only available encoded, so I can’t fix whatever their random bug is myself. I’m a quarter of the way through the product evaluation period, and I can’t use the product. I’ve contacted the company through email, through trouble tickets, through the forum and by thinking really, really hard at them. Other users of theirs have expressed similar problems.
Despite loudly claiming that they are a support-active company, in eight days, they have ignored every single attempt I’ve made at contact. They silently closed two seperate trouble tickets without a response.
I recommend against any of my readers ever doing business with ModernGigabyte in any fashion.
02.01.07
Federally Required Article Lambasting Boston
Normally I’d do the rant myself, but io_error did a better job than I’m likely to do. This article contains the single funniest thing I’ve ever seen him say (the line about the governor; you’ll know it when you see it.)
01.18.07
C’mon, seriously, do some damned research
On the one hand, I love things like “10 worst” lists. They help me remember that other people out there hate things as much as I do.
On the other hand, if you’re going to write a Ten Worst DS Game list, you just need to read through the game list. I can tell this author didn’t. How?
Nowhere in his ten worst occurs Whack a Mole. Then again, IGN gives whack-a-mole a five, so I guess the stupid isn’t yet monopolized.
01.02.07
MoonBooks!
So, I handed over some webspace to a guy on IRC who was converting books from Project Gutenberg for use with the bookreader in MoonShell for the Nintendo DS. He was trying to share a few books I recognized and they’re all legal, and his webspace was fail, so I figured I’d be goodbear and share.
Lo and behold, I take a look at the space I gave him - http://moonbooks.stonecypher.net/ - a few weeks later. He’s already got 150+ books up. Very rarely am I as happy with someone to whom I give resources as I am this time. This is a great example of shared resources being put to very good use. In particular, Brandon asked me what authors I liked, and when I name-dropped Ambrose Bierce, he went and converted what appears to be everything Bierce ever wrote, including a personal favorite called “Write it Right.”
Bravo. Makes me wonder who else I should be helping out, and I gave out another account today. We’ll see if it’s also put to good use.
10.26.06
Obligatory Halloween Post: Costas Efthimiou Fails It
Yet another mathematician who uses a silly premise to get Halloween headlines. This one’s kind of a flop, though. Costas Efthimiou claims that the population growth rate of vampires makes them fundamentally impossible. His reasoning is that, starting in 1600 from a population of 538 million, if each vampire converts one person into a vampire once a month, it will be only 2.6 years until all humans have been converted.
Now, this is a bit like saying that if a grasshopper eats a pound of grass a minute, given 1 billion grasshoppers and 500 million pounds of grass, then the Earth will be barren in about 30 seconds. Sure, the math works just fine, but the data is obviously wrong. Dracula was hundreds of years old (potentially thousands; the book doesn’t actually say,) and had created half a dozen childer. Lestat is 300 years old, and has only created two. Unfortunately I don’t wear enough white makeup and black hair dye to name any other vampires, but their birth rate is on the order of either decades or centuries, not single months.
So, fear not, Vlad: no matter what biology, history, zoology, archaeology or common sense may say about you, math hasn’t disproven a thing.
10.10.06
Yay, Dots!
And no, these dots aren’t being agitated. This is a simple visual/auditory demo with delusions of grandeur, but on the other hand, it is surprisingly pretty; very reminiscent of 80s demoscene stuff, back when (insert obviously false nostalgia here.) Granted, this is something of an old news moment, but hey, it’s the first time I saw it, and almost everyone I’ve showed it to thinks it’s new to, so good enough.
10.05.06
Malaysia For The Win
If the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis is true, then Malaysia may be the first nation which has found a way to turn police against stupidity. As the guinness guy would say, BRILLIANT.
What I would not give for something like this in America…
10.04.06
Whoa, Machine Sketch Interpretation That Actually Works
It’s been a good year for holy-crap technologies. This one - an MIT tool called ASSIST - boggles my mind, and it’s given me some seriously woot ideas. I’m filing it under Nintendo DS because, even though it’s not a game, that’s just the ideal platform for a better-developed such tool.
The YouTube video is short, but there’s a longer one at the main page.
10.02.06
A Million Dollars For A Strong Predictor
That’s right. Netflix will give you a million bucks if you can write an algorithm which one-ups their existing algorithm by 10% or better on grounds of predicting what their customers will like, based on their prior history.
Now that’s a win.