December 2004
Comair/Delta airline debacle caused by the...
Twelve inches of snow and ice, road closures, and a pesky overflow bug contributed to one of the worst holiday airline messes in recent years. I was stuck in the Cincinnati airport for a while and at the time, most people there attributed the problems to the snow and poor planning on the part of Delta/Comair. It’s doubtful that many people (except the nerdy guy I saw wearing a Firefox...
Viceland: iHustle - When Addicts Create
Apparently crackheads in New York are selling fake Apple laptops (that they lovingly craft themselves) for $200 outside of local liquor stores. Read the short tale of one guy that got ripped off… stupid college kids :P
After he left we dove into the garbage to see what the crackhead used to rip him off. Was it a brick in a laptop box? That’s what they used to do with video cameras....
More christmas gifts arrive!
A belt from my Aunt
Undershirts, socks, hair gel (I’m officially stocked for life), and EZ Mac
Two awesome red pasta bowls I wanted!
I actually used one tonight and it worked awesome! No noodles or sauce spillage at all! amazing! What’s even more amazing is that my Grandma was able to find the EXACT bowls we’d found here in cincinnati, down to the color and brand! Check it...
photo matt: Announcing bbPress
bbPress is the new forum software used on the Wordpress website.
The goal of bbPress is to bring some weblog and WordPress sensibilities to forum software. It’s never going to have a tenth of the features of phpBB or vBulletin, but that’s a feature itself. My experience with those packages is they’re like a herd of elephants who evolved on a strange island in bizzare ways, and they tend to...
Review of Linux for the iPod
Linux on the iPod is a very cool idea, but they still have a lot of work to do! The review says CBR mp3s are the only really reliable music you’re going to get to play. AAC, VBR MP3 and OGG are only partially supported at this time.
The coolest stuff are the games (asteroids,tetris!,othello) and the features they’re working on: iPod to iPod networking/file sharing using firewire.
...
Elliot Back: Spam Stopgap Extreme
An interesting solution. Force the user’s client to compute a dynamic (time and visitor dependent) hash in Javascript, and only allow the comment to post if the client passes back the right result.
Taking Matt’s stopgap spam solution, which sends precomputed hashes to be echoed back by the user-agent’s form, I’ve added dynamic generation of the md5 hash. Rather than write it to a hidden field,...
New Shirts at Testtube T-Shirts
Just wanted to let people know that we’ve got two new shirts available over at Testtube T-shirts and I really like them (I’m wearing one right now, actually).
The first is the winner of our contest from a few months ago, this was the user-submitted design that got the most votes from the public:
And here is one of the other geeky shirts that also got a lot of votes, but not as much as...
Comment Spammers are retarded
Over the past 24 hours I’ve recieved near 200 attempts to comment spam my blog and every single attempt has failed because they try the stupidest crap to try and post comments. Here’s just a little word for the wise:
If you use a relay proxy, you’re dead. Everytime you use one the system doesn’t know about, that IP is added to the list because of all the stupid shit your script tried to...
Website is slow?
Is it just me or is my website just barely poking along? The photogallery subpage is fine and subpages for individual entries seem to be alright, just the main page loads really slow for me. I cut down the number of entries from 10 to 5 and cut out all the extra PHP I’d added but things still seem to have sped up, but still not so quick either.
I’m going to upgrade my version of Wordpress...
Nick Spencer: New Ideas to Get Our City Moving...
Nick is running for City council and has the kind of idea that will attract young people like myself who are looking for somewhere fun, inspiring, and cool to live in Cincinnati. I think that if this city lured in just a grocery store and a movie theater they’d see a lot of change in the coming years. Nick has a lot of cool ideas and his post about getting Cincinnati moving is definitely worth...
Desktop rearranged
Nerd alert:
8bitpeoples: Christmas music made with vintage...
This music is totally awesome! Christmas music made with video game consoles and computer and done in the style of old video games.
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This very special holiday release from 8bitpeoples features an allstar cross-platform lineup that is sure to make yours a truly chippy christmas indeed. Brought together from all corners of the globe, these 8 amazing tunes were composed by 8 dedicated...
Not a creature was stirring, not even a cat
The Christmas Debacle
Here’s the series of events that led me to be stranded in Cincinnati this Christmas instead of going to my original destination of Wichita, KS!
We left our apartment at around 4:50PM so we could get to the airport in time for Jacqui to get to her gate for her 6:30 flight. The roads were still pretty bad from the great snowstorm and people were out in full force being retarded on the roads. ...
Snurf: a Python-based Blogging System
t differs from many similar systems in that it uses the file-system for data storage, and generates static HTML files which are then served by a standard web-server.
URI: Snurf: a Python-based Blogging System.
Huygens probe ready to detach from Cassini mother...
ESA`s Huygens probe, travelling on board NASA`s Cassini mother craft and powered through an umbilical cable, is now ready to separate and continue its journey alone toward Titan, Saturn`s largest moon.On Christmas night (25 December at 03:00 CET- orbiter time/04:08 CET on the ground) Huygens will be cut loose from Cassini and will coast toward Titan for 20 days, to arrive at its destination...
Airport Madness
I’m writing more about this, but here’s the gist:
I am not in Kansas, I am in Cincinnati and I will not be in Kansas for christmas ;)
Good picture I took today
The aftermath of the Cincinnati snow storm...from...
We needed to go to the ATM today to deposit my paycheck and Jacqui’s holiday bonus check so we thought we’d suit up and take a little trek 4 blocks and back and see how the city was doing under the snow and ice.
There were very few people on the street of Cincinnati today, but probably more than there are on a normal weekend. People were walking in the street because most sidewalks had gone...
Level 3 Snow Alert
Well we got around 10 inches of snow downtown yesterday and last night and the town is in disarray. As of 10:30am this morning, the streets downtown are unsalted and unplowed:
Normally, the streets would be teeming with cars and you’d see people walking here and there but today the streets are deserted, mostly because of the level 3 snow alert that has been enacted which makes it illegal...
Python for Nokia Series 60 Phones
Nokia has finally officially released their Python port for their Series 60 phones my 6600 and the 3650!
==
Python for Series 60 is capable of running applications that use native resources of Series 60 Platform and Symbian OS. It is well suited to the development of prototypes or for building proof of concept applications with a simple and consistent language. Python for Series 60 is an idea...
Scripting Outlook with Python
I wanted to write a python script that I could run every morning that would move all read and old messages out of my Inbox, if the message was old by unread it would stay around. I was having a tough time figuring out how to get python to speak to Outlook even though I’ve had a bit of experience with Python and Excel. I found a good example of working with Outlook’s datastructures in this blog...
Delicious Dinner
We had a great dinner tonight and the best part was that it was 100% made from scratch by the both of us :D Jacqui got me the book [I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking Just Here for More Food Alton Brown] by Alton Brown. It about a multitude of different baking styles and is a really awesome follow up to his first cook book, I’m just here for the Food.
I decided I would...
Albino Bowler
I forgot to post these last week along with my post that covered my horrible bowling. This is the award I won for getting the worst score one round:
There are more pics here
Xbox live screen name
If anyone would like to add me to their Xbox live list of friends my online name there is Clintology.
I currently have Guilty Gear XX, NFL Fever 2k3, and DDR Ultramix2 if you ever wanna play :)
Dreamhost is the most awesomest host
This came through to me earlier today:
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Due to multiple security flaws in PHP being discovered yesterday, we’re upgrading PHP to the newest version today. All upgrades should be complete by the end of the day. If you notice any problems with your PHP scripts, first look for a new version that is compatible with the newer PHP version, and if one isn’t available, please contact the maintainer...
Secret Santa Gift + Work Christmas Party +...
OK, where do begin. I’ve neglected talking about so many things that’ve happened in the past few days. I’ll start with yesterday’s stuff and work my way forward until right now.
Dec 15, 2004
I came home from work to find a box delivered to our apartment. I had a good idea that it was from my Ars Technica secret santa and I tore into it. What do you think I found inside? A freaking honey...
Why the Nokia 6600 might be better than a Treo 650
It all boils down to the beauty of Series 60, to me. Nokia may be a heartless ice queen running down freedom on her iron, lawyer-pulled sleigh, but she makes an amazingly polished operating system for phones. It’s not as PC-like as Palm or Windows Mobile, but it puts the phone functions first, instead of hidden behind layers of intelligent abstraction. That’s worth a lot—especially...
Some cool python links
Paramiko: ssh2 protocol for python pyArchive: Windows backup utility, with remote copy, and auto cleanup. Uses zip libs. I don’t see why this script couldn’t be easily ported to a linux/bsd equivelant Patching pysqlite to use Python’s standard datetimes htmldata: translate HTML documents back and forth to python data structures pyGoogleSuggest 0.0.1 Use python from Word Programming and...
MOZILLA FOUNDATION PLACES TWO-PAGE ADVOCACY AD IN...
The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to...
Yahoo! News - FCC to Allow Wireless Access on...
The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) on Wednesday approved technology giving airlines what could be a cheaper option to provide Internet connections. The commissioners also voted to solicit public comment about ending the ban on in-flight use of cell phones.
URI: Yahoo! News - FCC to Allow Wireless Access on Planes.
I know I blogged about this a few...
Speaking of socks: iPod Socks (more like sucks am...
We’re now the proud owner of six brightly colored iPod socks
A cat and his sock
I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided that if I were a cat, I would probably use a dirty sock as a pillow, too:
Ahhh, the life of a cat is so weary!
Ars Technica: MSN Toolbar Suite: invasion of the...
Weeks after launching their own online search engine aimed at Google-users, Microsoft’s MSN division launches “phase-two” in the form of a desktop search tool with some improvements over Google’s similar offering.
URI: MSN Toolbar Suite: invasion of the desktop search applications.
(Via [Ars Technica].) by Clint Ecker
Rough Draft: the great playlist meme of '04
Here are the instructions:
1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty....
Snowing like crazy!
I got a good pelting of sleet on my walk to work this morning but right now its snowing HARD. This is awesome I’ve been wanting snow for a while now.
QOTD: How do you organize your feeds
I think this image is pretty self-explanatory. I group news by topic, and some of the people I know into regional groups. There are some people in “Web Design” and there are blogs that deal explicitly with adult topics.
Everyone else, unless they post primarily about programming goes into the “Miscellaneous” pile. That would include people like kottke, scoble, erik B., and just about...
WP-Blacklist
I haven’t had to manually delete a spam comment from my moderation queue in days. WP catches 100% of spam posts to my blog, but they’re held up in my moderation queue and every few days I have to go through and tick them all and hit delete. Now WP-Blacklist checks each poster’s IP against a database of open relay proxies and if they’re a match the posts are automatically deleted from the queue. ...
Jacqui and Cats
online.effbot.org: A stupid Google Suggest Hack
A python function that takes a word or phrase as its input and accesses the Google suggest results and returns them as a packed tuple.
a stupid google suggest hack
URI: online.effbot.org.
(Via [Online.Effbot.org].)
print suggest("python")
produces
(None, 'python', ('python', 'python tutorial', 'pythons', 'python 2.2', 'python 2.2.1', 'python ide', 'python...
WashingtonPost.com: Start a Winning Blog
The Washington Post wants to tell you how you can become a super-blogger and be the envy of your friends and family :)
POST OFTEN — AND WELL. When a blogger adds new material, it’s called a post. And good blogging demands frequent posting.
URI: Start a Winning Blog (washingtonpost.com).
(Via [The Washington Post].)
Sprint and Nextel agree to merger
Whoa. This is big :) T-Mobile is getting pushed to the bottom of the pile. Will T-Mobile be the only non-mergeredized carrier? We seem to be holding our own pretty good even without all the high-speed network stuff.
The Wall Street Journal reported moments ago that the two companies have “tentatively” agreed to join forces, with Sprint swapping 1.3 of its shares for every Nextel share....
Purdue researchers try to make artificial bones...
Researchers from Purdue University have found that artificial joints can be improved by mimicking the alignment of collagen fibers and natural ceramic crystals in real bones.
URI: Technology Review: Aligned Nanotubes Accommodate Bone.
Via (BoingBoing).
Go Purdue ;)
FCC to review cellphone ban in planes
This has always been a stupid ban. I’ve had discussions with my Engineering professors who’ve told me that there are no electronics on modern airplanes that could possibly pick up interference from the high-frequency electronics within cell-phone and that the ban isn’t based on any good reasoning.
I’m not quite sure why you’d want to use your cell phone in mid-flight though, maybe to make an...
T-Mobile USA says no 3G until 2007
I don’t see how we wrote our own obituary. Its not like T-Mobile can magically make spectrum appear out of thin air :) I really shouldn’t comment any more on our plans for the data network as that’s probably a really big no-no and I could lose my job. I, as much as anyone, would like to see UTMS come to T-mo sooner.
I, personally, as a small peon who knows nothing about what’s been going...
Goo
I was hanging another fly paper today because the previous one was removed yesterday by a Cat. As I finally got it hung up there it stuck to my arm and got stick stuff on me :P
Normal methods do not remove this stuff so I had to take drastic action: I grabbed for the bottle of goo-gone. As I’m spraying the citrusy stuff on my arm I think to myself:
I wonder if human flesh is consdered to...
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Remake Trailer
This movie is going to be MESSED UP. There is like a 1% chance it’ll be as cool as the original because Tim Burton is directing it, but Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka? Ehhhh
Link to the Video Trailer
(Via What Do I Know? and Waxy.org Links ).
Mozilla's Minimo hopes to stir up mobile browsing
So why, when Firefox is just now picking up steam in the main arena, is there a development team working hard to find another Goliath to do battle with? According to Doug Turner, project leader of Minimo, the reasons are clear-cut — Mozilla’s browser carries no royalty fees and can run on just about everything
URI: Mozilla’s Minimo hopes to stir up mobile browsing.
...
Money is Back
Well this morning all of the missing money got deposited back into our checking account. Bad news is that one final $50 transaction at a gas station showed up today so I resent the claim with the appended charge. We should have that replaced by Monday.
Today is my Dad’s birthday and he’s actually coming up to Cincinnati to hang out with us this weekend. Hopefully we’ll get to take him to...
Early Xmas
Me and Jacqui decided we wanted to each open one of our gifts tonight because hers and one of mine finally came today. Jacqui wrote up a bit about it here
She got me this awesome little 4 port firewire repeater that lets me hook up all of my firewire devices at once (iSight and iPod). This is awesome because I’d have to take my webcam down to sync my iPod and the cable switching sucked big...