Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:14 "Caching is hard" -- somebody smart #
  • 15:28 Something on wikitruth.info re: Jimmy Wales' secret "google killer" plans.. Wtf? Only decent way to even search Wikipedia is with Google! #
  • 18:59 Web ads that are GeoIP-powered always think I live in Tucker. #
  • 19:51 @scottlong I'm a LOT closer to tucker than you are to lawrenceville. Google maps says only 3.6 miles to downtown Tucker. #
  • 20:24 @drew826 They show about the sensor module but they don't show anything at all about the boards. Might wanna try some double-side tape.. #
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 12:27 Eventually, I do plan to finish "The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It". I read the first part of it about six months ago. #
  • 19:20 Successfully refrained from ordering a durian smoothie #
  • 22:43 cheesy poofs + coffee w/ cream and sugar == really strange taste #
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Monday, December 29, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 21:28 tinyurl.com/574o77 Really? It really can't play DVD without hacking? It should play $#@! Blu-ray out of the box. #
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Sunday, December 28, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 17:40 just slept about 14 hours. #
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Saturday, December 27, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 12:48 Disturbingly few people out doing day-after-christmas shopping in Mobile this morning. Depression is on! #
  • 17:12 A stranger in World Market just asked me if they sold bloody mary mix, like I work here. Must be the "Krusin' with the Kyles" shirt. #
  • 17:14 @Streyeder montgomery #
  • 17:25 Don't get these antiqued globes with modern country names. A globe so old its brown should have c. 1900 labelling. #
  • 18:14 Pop actually did eat itself. #
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Friday, December 26, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 20:47 My parents gave me a wii #
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Sunday, December 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 12:55 Wintzell's oyster house #
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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Mom and dad take in another stray


Pink pig


Tweets for Today

  • 10:14 At Great Clips, there's no middle ground between Sports Illustrated and Ladies Home Journal. #
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Friday, December 19, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:31 Finally figured out that my left ear needs a larger earbud than my right. #
  • 15:01 2009 is going to be the year I get back to playing music in front of people. #
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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:01 "Now I'm not frightened of this world, believe me." - Ray Davies #
  • 18:03 @WillCockrell @methodicechidna @quinbot what about guys that piss without holding onto their dicks? #
  • 22:09 Trip to milwaukee canceled. Yay for teleconferencing. #
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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders

If you have any vinyl records from the early 1970s, or at least any issued by Warner/Reprise anyway, you've probably seen ads for these compilation albums.

They were sold at a loss, as advertisements to boost sales for the more "underground" artists on the Warners labels. Particularly, it would seem, Frank Zappa and associates.

This is new stuff, NOT old tracks dredged out of our Dead Dogs files. If our Accounting Department were running the company, they'd charge you $9.96 for each double album. But they're not. Yet.

We are not 100 per cent benevolent. It's our fervent hope that you, Dear Consumer, will be encouraged to pick up more of what you hear on these special albums at regular retail prices.


The mix of artists even on a single one of these records crazy diverse, and nothing is segregated by genre. On the early albums, you will quite literally find Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Randy Newman, James Taylor, and Gordon Lightfoot sharing the same record. This defies all notions of market segmentation.

Either they were really ahead of their time, reflecting how people would eventually put all those together on their mixtapes and iPods, or they just didn't care.

Did I forget to mention that the later albums in the series was compiled by Dr. Demento?

Note: this is the kind of thing that really needs to be featured on Boing Boing.

Tweets for Today

  • 11:14 Live deer running down spalding drive. #
  • 15:24 Many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time. #
  • 20:54 If I was Mark Prior, I'd call my blog "Mark Prior Opened". (Blackberry humor) #
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:53 Something you should know about me: "The Width of a Circle" by David Bowie has been stuck in my head and constantly hummed for 6 months. #
  • 10:59 There must be at least 2 cubic yards of styrofoam peanuts sitting unattended outside KP's cubicle. There must be an evil use for these. #
  • 12:06 The more copy-and-paste used in creating a piece of code, the more it looks from a distance like song lyrics. #
  • 12:21 @Streyeder didn't watch anything as a kid that would have that. I was a boy, see.. It does sound like something my daughters would watch tho #
  • 13:56 Just bought tickets to Mil-f*cking-waukee. #
  • 14:06 When you hear software described as "patchy, patchy", do you think of: a) tinyurl.com/5cx7y6 b) tinyurl.com/6q5mlf c) neither #
  • 14:20 breadsticks!!! #
  • 14:59 Oh bloody hell.. No wonder nobody here knows what my job is. The title on my nameplate 18 mos out of date. #
  • 15:09 "The man who sold the world" is the only Bowie album that reveals what a just plain *scary* guitarist Mick Ronson was. #
  • 16:00 Todo: write a blog post explaining/advocating Humble Pie in the same manner as I already did for Grand Funk and Uriah Heep. #
  • 16:01 @Streyeder jeff-robertson.com #
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Monday, December 15, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 14:41 Almost had to explain to my 6-year old what "mofo" means. #
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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 00:57 @methodicechidna come crash my company xmas party in woodland hills ca #
  • 16:50 @scottlong: I've been in bumper to bumper traffic to get to lenox square for about 45 minues. #
  • 17:05 Overheard at mall: "everything I want, I buy. This is one of the thinks I like, so I just have to buy it" #
  • 17:44 Pink piggin' #
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Saturday, December 13, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 18:24 70's TV poll: Wayne Rogers/McClean Stevenson era M*A*S*H vs Mike Farrell/Harry Morgan era M*A*S*H. #
  • 22:27 I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good #
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Friday, December 12, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:36 My new corduroy jacket smells like old library books! #
  • 19:19 Three airports in two days. #
  • 19:20 No, four airports. Forgot to count ATL itself. #
  • 21:01 Definition of niche appeal: a bluegrass drag act #
  • 21:34 I've just been told that Athens GA still has a Gumby's Pizza. #
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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 17:05 If I'm going to keep doing business with bankers, I need to start spending more on clothes. #
  • 17:45 Turkey, bacon, and advocado sandwhich. #
  • 20:02 Lining up to get a table at this "Slanted Door" like it was concert tickets or something. Better be worth it. #
  • 21:49 It was, in fact, worth it. #
  • 22:36 BART train sounds like that noise at the beginning of "2112". #
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:05 Look familiar? tinyurl.com/6baxm6 #
  • 11:49 Holy shit, I might have to go to wisconsin. In december. #
  • 20:23 Exposing the kids to M.A.M.E. #
  • 22:57 Web forms that write to the database as soon as you click them, w/o an explicit "save"? Do not want. Twitter, I'm lookin' at you. #
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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 18:31 Whatever happened to steak 'ems anyway? #
  • 18:51 @scottlong Is the third from right flipping the bird? #
  • 19:15 @WillCockrell so it would appear. For some reason I associate them as a food of my childhood. I think because they used to advertise on tv. #
  • 20:43 Starting a list of Simpsons episodes to let D. watch after she turns 7. #
  • 22:34 I like my beer cold, my tv loud, and my Sylar... Eeeevil. #
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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:56 Thinking of switching back to solid shaving soap. #
  • 16:09 @scottlong I take it this means you won't be at the company christmas party tonight? #
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Saturday, December 06, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:17 oh it hurts, it hurts: xkcd.com/513/ #
  • 17:00 "South Old Peachtree Road": most awesome Peachtree name variant? #
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Friday, December 05, 2008

Caching Matters

Latency is not zero. What's more latency will never be zero unless we invent completely new communication technologies. We currently have no communication method that operates at faster than light speed. At light speed it takes 30ms to get from one side of the Atlantic to the other (not the furthest your web data may have to travel). Those 30ms slices add up, and that's assuming you've got a direct and perfect connection to your users. You don't, so chances are the best latency you can cope for is much longer than 30ms.

Cho dang tofu house, buford highway


Tweets for Today

  • 14:11 the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent #
  • 16:50 Busting hard, crystallized sugar out of the bottom of a coffee cup. #
  • 18:59 Bay Area people: recommend me a lunch, walking distance from the Embarcadero BART. #
  • 20:30 If you have a Trader Joes in your city, buy Simpler Times lager. Cheap enough to drink like it was water. Good enough too. #
  • 21:04 "You are the silent killer. Go back to the annex." #
  • 09:17 oh it hurts, it hurts: xkcd.com/513/ #
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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Six dollar shades


Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Musical Cliche Figure Signifying The Far East: Whence, Wherefore, Whither?

God I love the web.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Bayou La Batre boat building business boom?


Tweets for Today

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2600 ftw


Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Just one cotton picking minute


Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:38 Scott, is this what you were telling me about the other day? tinyurl.com/54rwpu #
  • 09:10 Wouldn't think it would be possible for corn nuts to go bad. #
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Monday, November 24, 2008

My daughter writes music!


"How to Write With Style" by Kurt Vonnegut

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.


(via)

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:47 The thing about a wife who saw "Mommy Dearest" so many times is when you need wire hangers to make something, there's none in the house. #
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Saturday, November 22, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:23 At certain zoom levels, Government Boulevard in Mobile is abbreviate as "Gut Blvd" on Google Maps. Lol. #
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Friday, November 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:01 @WillCockrell The last Classic Rock album is "Back in Black" by AC/DC. Anything newer than that is just rock. Everyone knows that. #
  • 16:48 Ok, this is creeping me out: tinyurl.com/5ja7ke #
  • 19:35 got a woman that cooks shrimp n' grits! #
  • 23:02 Whine pt3: How did Nat'l Geo. go from mostly pics of people w/o nudity taboos, to all about how we're killing the earth? Boomers! #
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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:04 everflush at work #
  • 15:48 Six cokes (not diet) in six hours. #
  • 21:01 Whine, part1: Man is it less cool to be thirty-something now than it would have been to be it back when Thirtysomething was actually on TV. #
  • 21:20 Whine, part2: between Gen X and Gen Y, I will never be part of a mass cultural identity. Neither fish nor foul, fax machine nor facebook. #
  • 22:01 feels like an idiot. A happy idiot, but still.. #
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

the web blame list

I'm starting to make a list of who to blame for technologies that are annoying and/or widely despised. Specifically, the web browsers (and their makers) to introduce annoying and despised aspects of web development.

In (very) roughly chronological order:

  • Browser history as a one-dimensional array through which one can only navigate "forward" and "back": (probably) NCSA Mosaic
  • The poverty of HTML forms: Mosaic
  • What the REST guys derisively call "overloaded POST": Mosaic
  • Browsers not supporting PUT, DELETE, or WebDAV: Mosaic
  • The suckiness of HTTP authentication prompts, leading to it never being used except on intranets: Mosaic (I think)
  • FONT, BLINK, @BGCOLOR, and most other presentational markup: Netscape
  • Use of tables for page layout: Netscape
  • SSL/TLS not being part of HTTP; SSL/TLS not doing anything to prevent phishing: Netscape
  • 40-bit SSL: Good ole Uncle Sam
  • Animated GIFs on web pages: Netscape
  • Browser "plugins", leading ultimately to all-Flash "web pages": Netscape (yes, Flash is cool and useful - without it there' be no Youtube - but you can't tell me it's not also frequently annoying and widely dispised)
  • Javascript: Netscape (see above)
  • Cookies: Netscape (again)
  • Applets: Netscape and Sun (and again)
  • Why you have to use both EMBED and OBJECT tags to put a movie on a webpage in order to make sure "both" browsers play it: Netscape and Microsoft
  • The poverty of DOM Level 0: Netscape
  • Frames: Netscape
  • IFrames: Microsoft
  • "DOM wars", aka "DHTML": Netscape and Microsoft
  • Crappy non-compliant CSS implementations as a normal fact of everyday life: Netscape and Microsoft (especially Microsoft)
  • PNG support being adopted so slowly that even today few sites use it: (mostly) Microsoft
  • ActiveX controls on web pages: Microsoft
  • NTLM authentication: Microsoft

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:28 Calling all nerds: go read RFC 1627. Were those guys onto something? #
  • 19:24 Daughter just served me diet coke mixed with prune juice. Tastes kinda like Dr. Pepper. Awesome. #
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Monday, November 17, 2008

The 20 Worst Foods in America

All looks like good eats to me.

Meme Agora: Library Oriented Programming

This explains tools like Maven and Ivy. While Java is a library oriented language, no good facilities exist within the language to manage libraries.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:37 Never going to jiffy-lube again. #
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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 19:56 Watching the shuttle launch live at the planetarium. #
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Friday, November 14, 2008

Online advertising is now dead (Scripting News)

Damn straight. The ads on this blog have never earned me one thin dime. Course, the four or five people who read it probably do it by feed, so you never see the ads.

SaaS market will collapse in two years

We better milk this thing while we can, boys.

Tweets for Today

  • 18:19 Chocolate Skittles == bizarro, hard M&M's #
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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:13 Poll: "Where Eagles Dare" by Iron Maiden vs. "Where Eagles Dare" by The Misfits. #
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 07:51 Drinking milkshakes cold and long. #
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Monday, November 10, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:52 This story has no moral; this story has no end; this story just goes to show that there ain't no good in men. #
  • 11:03 Whaddaya mean I couldn't be the President of the United States of America? Tell you somethin', it's still "We the People", right? #
  • 20:30 They tried hard to make a flashback Simpsons less funny than kabf04, but that proved impossible. Meh. #
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Sunday, November 09, 2008

thanksgiving came a little early this year

For anyone who's heard me complain about anything lately, you were right. I have it really good. Really. My life is so easy that I am constantly trying to think of ways to make it harder. I think I'm gonna try to stick with it for now.

Note: This was not brought on by seeing that cars were having to swerve to avoid me while I was operating a leaf blower and listening to the ipod, and realizing what might have happened if they couldn't swerve fast enough. It would have been a cool way to die, especially if it somehow got publicly reported that I had been listening to "Crazy Train" when the accident happened, but I'm glad it didn't happen today. I'd already decided to be fat and happy and thankful a long time before that realization.

the Mobile Web is Dead

Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket? Thanks to the iPhone, it is now clear to everyone that this idea of a second class Web for mobile phones was a stopgap solution at best whose time is now past.


See also The end of Mowser.

Tweets for Today

  • 08:49 Sweatah weathah! #
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A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel

Nerdgasm.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows | A Padded Cell

Because I'm reading the web a year behind.

Using seeqpod to download MP3s

The world of RESTful webservices and the world of music downloads occasionally overlap.

Tweets for Today

  • 15:39 Why have I never used seeqpod.com before? This rocks. #
  • 15:50 List of bands that I would probably like if I hadn't been avoiding them since 1993 because of "hype aversion", part 2: the Descendents #
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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 17:31 Spotted a car with bumper stickers for both Obama and bow-hunting. Ted Nugent would be pissed. #
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

comments on my music that I have decided to treat as compliments, regardless of the intent

"What would the clash have sounded like if they were awful electronic musicians"

"The Smurfs go Country."

"Sounds like if Louis Armstrong were a crow and you lit him on fire and let him fly around a room with some guys playing music in there"

"Like Jethro Tull retired to a trailer park in Louisiana"

"Hillbilly Bowie"

Tweets for Today

  • 06:59 Less than 50 people in front of me to vote. Where's those crazy lines now? #
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:21 Why don't I feel like I got to sleep an extra hour this morning? #
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Monday, November 03, 2008

Tunneling TCP based protocols through Web proxy servers

Work related. This is the expired never-became-an-RFC that describes how SSL works over proxies.

just about the nerdiest thing I could come up with this morning

ISO 8601 is an international standard for representing date and time information.

RFC 3339 is a subset of ISO 8601 intended for use in Internet protocols. (Note that since this dates only from 2002, you won't see it used in either SMTP or HTTP headers, the only two Internet protocols that most people are likely to ever see)

Meanwhile, XML Schema defines a dateTime that is also based of ISO 8601. These are used, of course, in XML documents. This is what you get when you serialize a java.util.Date field with JAXB, for instance.

Now here's the fun part: RFC 3339 and xsd:dateTime, although both based on ISO 8601 and looking at first glance very similar, are not identical. And apparently different enough that it gave the Atom developers some pause, as seen here.

Read all of this shit. There's a lesson to learn somewhere.

As an example of where this can sow confusion, assume you're developing a web service (possibly a RESTful one) that needs to pass date and time information in places that are protocol headers nor part of XML documents. For instance, date fields embedded in the URL. It makes sense to use something based on ISO 8601, and it also makes sense to use one of the two subsets mentioned here. But which one?

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 16:35 Z. is schooling the other kids on how to operate a playground swing. #
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Tweets for Today

  • 07:48 Bama bound. #
  • 12:20 Checked into the Hotel Mallet #
  • 12:38 My route to Tuscaloosa, part of it on dirt roads: tinyurl.com/66gcto #
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Saturday, November 01, 2008

These signs were all over tuscaloosa


Tweets for Today

  • 11:13 Number of people seen wearing customes at work today: three. Number of Sara Palin costumes: one. Palins-per-capita percentage: 33.33%. #
  • 17:06 Exactly one year as a Civic owner. #
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Friday, October 31, 2008

Why I'm not trying to go to tuscaloosa a night early


Tweets for Today

  • 08:49 Since when have web pages been able to have customized "right click" menus? I always thought that was "impossible" but Google maps does it. #
  • 15:19 why the hell is my office so much colder than the rest of the building? #
  • 16:24 The problem with recycling is that I can be reminded how many cokes I've consumed by a single glance at the bin. I just don't wanna know. #
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Thursday, October 30, 2008

The other one


He's a jukebox hero, got stars in his eyes


Wednesday, October 29, 2008

something learned at AJUG this month

The "$" character in Java is not just for the compiler to stick into the class file names of inner classes. No, you can use it in your own class, method, and variable names too. How did I not know this?


package com.jeff_robertson;

public class $Make$Money$Fast {

public static void main(String $ARGV[]) {

String foo$bar = "foobar";

System.out.println(foo$bar);

String $perl = "...";

String BASIC$ = get$money();

}

public static String get$money() {
return "$1,000,000";
}

}

Tweets for Today

  • 16:22 I gotta find some more prolific twitterers to follow. Cause ya'lls are some quiet mofos lately. #
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:54 List of bands that I would probably like if I hadn't been avoiding them since 1993 because of "hype aversion", part 1: Wilco #
  • 16:31 Hype aversion is an instinctive ego-defense. "If *I've* never heard it, it must suck". Saves you from knowing there's stuff you don't know. #
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Monday, October 27, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:52 Today is the day I make my girls watch Star Wars. #
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Saturday, October 25, 2008

purple grits


Tweets for Today

  • 08:27 Nice boys don't play rock and roll. #
  • 08:39 Oh iPod, why didn't they just make you with a standard USB jack? #
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Friday, October 24, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:35 dropped my blackberry on the floor so hard the battery fell out. just realized that the SIM fell out too and wtf knows where it is now #
  • 10:33 Doh. Sim never left BB, but was loose so the BB thought it was gone. I realized after sifting thru trash can for it. #
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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:06 Somebody actually just asked me to explain something "in lehman's terms". Bizarre typo, new meme poking at Lehman bros, or Freudian slip? #
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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

InfoQ: REST Anti-Patterns

I think I may be turning into a RESTafarian. Been playing with Jersey a bit too much.

Tweets for Today

  • 09:27 @WillCockrell How similar is Connecticut to what was depicted on "Gilmore Girls"? #
  • 09:29 Found a bunch of of psedoephedrine in the pocket of a jacket that I can't even remember the last time I wore. #
  • 11:28 The girl from The Wonder Years is a popular writer on mathematics?! Nova should have told me this. Head asplode. #
  • 13:07 Powerpoint presentation procrastination party. #
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Monday, October 20, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:27 no radio station billing itself as "oldies" has any excuse to play any song younger than me. stick with your core demographic to the grave. #
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Sunday, October 19, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:56 my first-grader is "smarter than a fifth grader" #
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Saturday, October 18, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:35 oh, the things that the president would oppose under "ordinary circumstances"! #
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Friday, October 17, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 02:04 Nighttime roadgeek run thru downtown LA, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank. #
  • 09:21 approximate route last night: tinyurl.com/4ptbb5 #
  • 22:09 been doin' some good old fashioned bloggin'. by gar, it's been a while. blog.jeff-robertson.com #
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Thursday, October 16, 2008

NCSA HTTPd/Mosaic: Using PGP/PEM auth

Or, what we might have ended up using instead of HTTPS. In some ways this is nicer than HTTPS, since it puts the key exchange in HTTP. Apparently this was killed by export restrictions on RSA, although it seems like the same thing would have stopped SSL too.

On the other hand, SSL has the advantage of keeping the encryption out of HTTP altogether. Thus keeping HTTP that much simpler, and also enable SSL to be used as a generic tunnel for other protocols as well. Remember, worse is better.

LINK: The Chuck Cunningham of HTTP

If you actually read RFC 1945, the document that describes HTTP/1.0, one thing you'll notice is that section 8, where the methods are defined, has only GET, HEAD, and POST. The PUT and DELETE methods that are so important to advocates RESTful web services are relegated to Appendix D, "additional features".

This appendix documents protocol elements used by some existing HTTP implementations, but not consistently and correctly across most HTTP/1.0 applications. Implementors should be aware of these features, but cannot rely upon their presence in, or interoperability with, other HTTP/1.0 applications.


This also where a number of other familiar things like the Accept-* family of headers were listed. In RFC 2616 these were promoted to full-fledged features of HTTP 1.1.

But wait.. Appendix D also lists a couple of methods I'd never heard of before: LINK and UNLINK. And some headers (Link, Title, URI) that appear to have been intended to be used with them.

These features are simply missing from HTTP/1.1. They disappeared, like a TV character simply being dropped between seasons with no explanation or mention. They weren't put on a bus, they didn't die in a plane crash with no survivors on their way back home, a bridge didn't collapse on them. The powers that be just decided that they never existed at all.

The Link header is described:

The Link entity-header field provides a means for describing a relationship between the entity and some other resource. An entity may include multiple Link values. Links at the metainformation level typically indicate relationships like hierarchical structure and navigation paths.


This sounds a lot like HTML link tag. Redundant, even.

Digging around, I found this description of the HTTP of 1992, written by Tim Berners-Lee himself. This documents the protocol in a stage between "HTTP 0.9" with it's GET method and no headers and the eventual HTTP/1.0 standard.

In the section on "Object Headers", we find:


Note. It is proposed that any HTML metainformation element (allowed withing the HEAD as opposed to BODY element of the document) be a valid candidate for an HTTP object header. LINK is one example, TITLE another. One suggestion was that the isomorphism should be realized by prepending "WWW-" to the HTML element name to make the HTTP header name, and the HTML attributes imply identically named semicolon-separated MIME-style header parameters. It is open to discussion whether the "WWW-" should be inserted or not.


Apparently sometime between HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 they finally decided that this wasn't something that needed to be in HTTP after all.

I have to admit I'm a little bit sad. When dealing with (X)HTML these headers and the methods to put/delete them are redundant, but they could be useful for non-HTML. One use I can imagine would be to provide the title ("alt text") of a photo as part of the HTTP response for requesting the actual image file, rather than having that text only exist in the HTML that embeds the photo. Maybe Link(s) to the homepages of the people in the photo. Of course it would require the web server to maintain some kind of database in which to store this data, which might have been asking too much of in 1996. But now? I think we could have used these little guys.

EDIT: It just dawned on me that understanding how things like this get abandoned and yet the world still turns out OK, means understanding a great truth applicable to other domains besides HTTP. After all, if PUT, POST, and DELETE had been widely implemented as they were originally designed - to allow users to create and edit web pages using features directly built into their browsers - then mankind would never need to have invented things called "wikis" and "blogs", and then where would we be?

Tweets for Today

  • 08:43 I don't want nobody to give me nothin'. Open up the door, I'll get it myself. #
  • 09:00 There is so much awesome on _Physical_Graffiti_ that the otherwise-mindblowing "Kashmir" is rendered lame for obscuring the rest. #
  • 18:18 At the airport, explaining the food at Paschals to people from NJ. #
  • 18:31 Ever since I was eight years old I've always wanted to write a song about Duran Duran to the tune of "Barbara Ann". #
  • 18:38 Add to the list of band/album/song name ideas: [Son of] Mr. Green Screens. #
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

why the hell didn't I ever try this before

For years and years (like since approximately 2001) I've been bitching and complaining, and never doing anything in particular, about customizing HTTP basic authentication in a servlet container. It's container specific, it involves lots of XML, and it usually involves sticking your classes up into the appserver's backside.

I've never actually gotten it to work. Then again, I haven't really tried all that hard either. It's just always seemed like more work than it's worth, especially when compared to things like Restlet and even Sun's own com.sun.net.httpserver. Anyway, I never did it. Instead I did this:

Just write a servlet filter that does the authentication and sets up the request appropriately. Duh. Why didn't they just include a class like this in the Servlet API instead of all the shenanigans?

NOTE: Yes, I know basic authentication is insecure. Prove to me that it's somehow less secure than an HTML form sending the credentials in plain text.


import java.io.IOException;
import java.security.Principal;

import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;

public class BasicAuthServletFilter implements Filter {

private SessionCache sessions = new SessionCache();


public void doFilter(ServletRequest arg0, ServletResponse arg1,
FilterChain arg2) throws IOException, ServletException {

HttpServletRequest httpRequest = (HttpServletRequest) arg0;
HttpServletResponse httpResponse = (HttpServletResponse) arg1;

String auth = httpRequest.getHeader("Authorization");

if( auth == null ) {
send401(httpResponse);
return;
}

String[] tokens = auth.split(" ");

if( !tokens[0].equalsIgnoreCase("Basic")) {
send401(httpResponse);
return;
}

String[] credentials = new String( Base64.decodeBase64(tokens[1].getBytes()) ).split(":");


try {
customLogin( credentials[0], credentials[1] );
} catch (Exception e) {
send401(httpResponse);
return;
}

// implementation of MyPrincipal is left an exercise for the reader
final java.security.Principal p = new MyPrincipal(credentials[0]);

HttpServletRequestWrapper wrapper = new HttpServletRequestWrapper(httpRequest) {

@Override
public String getAuthType() {
return HttpServletRequest.BASIC_AUTH;
}

@Override
public String getRemoteUser() {
return p.getName();
}

@Override
public Principal getUserPrincipal() {
return p;
}

@Override
public boolean isUserInRole(String role) {
// probably want to customize here
return true;
}
};


arg2.doFilter(wrapper, arg1);

}

private void send401(HttpServletResponse httpResponse) throws IOException {
httpResponse.setHeader("WWW-Authenticate",
"Basic realm=\"My Realm\"");
httpResponse.sendError(401);
}

public void customLogin(String user, String password) throws Exception {

// proprietary business logic (TM)

}


public void init(FilterConfig arg0) throws ServletException {
}


public void destroy() {
}




}

Friday, October 10, 2008

Jersey: RESTful Web services made easy

Work related

Tweets for Today

  • 20:04 testing #
  • 22:28 testing again #
  • 22:29 - #
  • 22:30 Kentucky (4-1) 14 2 Alabama (6-0) 17 #
  • 22:30 yes im working on that football thing #
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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Mustache progress update


Sunday, October 05, 2008

IMG00159.jpg


IMG00160.jpg


Saturday, October 04, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:54 do not expect any further statements. the sons of batman don't talk. we act. #
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Monday, September 29, 2008

MixTube

File this under "ideas that I should have thought of".

We realized that the music you listen to is already on YouTube, so we started with some source code from the Opentape folks (thank you!), added in the YouTube Javascript API, and we had a website.

closer to controversy than I imagined

The pictures I posted yesterday were taken at South Peachtree Creek. While I was enjoying the perfect weather and the undeveloped "woodsy" area, I did not realize how close I was to the apparently controversial South Peachtree Creek Trail.


PATH May Have To Take A Bath on South Peachtree Creek Project

3 Forks Heritage Alliance appears to be a group opposed to the completion of the trail.

Save Our Trail takes the other side.


I have to admit I have mixed feelings. I've been a fan of Mason Mill Park, Ira Meadows Park, and the adjacent areas ever since I used to live off North Decatur Road back in 2000/2001. One of the things I liked about the trails area (which is quite separate from the developed area of Mason Mill park with its tennis courts etc) is that it's like that vacant wooded parcel of land you used to trespass into as a kid - lots of little footpaths beaten through the woods with no rhyme or reason to them, access to the CSX railroad tracks with no fences or anything to stop you from being run over by a train, mysterious "ruins" of the abandoned waterworks... it really does feel more like a cool old abandoned property than an officially public space. And I'd like for it to stay that way. OTOH it may be that adding a little bit of infrastructure, some kind of investment, might be what is required in order to prevent it from being carved up into new houses or apartments or something.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

No title


"That's really deep!"


Stepping stones


Another born internet addict


Picnic day


Saturday, September 27, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 17:26 Made the mistake of going to quicktrip to get coffee. Gas lines from the Carter years. People pushing empty cars into the station. Good ... #
  • 17:42 "No money, no gas. No money, no senorita." - cop at quiktrip #
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Friday, September 26, 2008

Comic Strip Archive

"We've compiled links to old comic strips for every comic we could find."

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Effects Explained

Definitely not work related.

Tweets for Today

  • 17:46 The smell of burnt microwave popcorn has followed me home from work. #
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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

In pursuit of code quality: Code quality for software architects

This too.

In pursuit of code quality: Monitoring cyclomatic complexity

Work related (duh).

Breakfast


Sunday, September 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 12:26 Waited 3 years for Gwinnett Co to open Graves Park when I lived about 1/2 mile from it. Now the thing is open and the grass is greener. #
  • 20:34 America's chicken industry needs to do something to promote dark meat. Come on, the ad campaign practically writes itself. #
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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:19 Switching back from ie8b2 to ie7 for "quality center". #
  • 15:30 Using a printer that prints on a 3-foot-wide, 150-foot long roll of paper somehow feels like something Tim "the tool man" Taylor would do. #
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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance


Friday, September 12, 2008

Naughty But Mice (1947)

I believe this was before the cat in the duo that eventually became Herman and Katnip was named.

One noticed two things immediately:

1) Unlike in most cat-vs-mouse or cat-vs-bird cartoons from the era, it's made very clear that this cat does in fact catch and eat mice, just not this mouse.
2) Yes, Virginia, when a cat eats a mouse, the mouse dies. And is missed by his family, just like when your grandpa died last year!
3) Unlike in most cartoons from this or any other era, dynamite is depicted as actually having the ability to kill someone. Who'd a thunk?
4) The cat's reaction to the "100 proof" cat nip is pretty awesome.
5) With all this, it's less funny than Tom and Jerry. (Or Itchy and Scratchy)


Tweets for Today

  • 18:42 Got a tape of "Herman and Catnip", the *other* inspiration of Itchy and Scratchy... at Goodwill! #
  • 18:48 Seriously.. Catnip has already died in one cartoon (producing nine ghosts) and Herman has cheerily used the words "death rattle" in another. #
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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:15 Krystal: the "burger" with advertisements for its own eating contest on every single box. #
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Lilies


Tweets for Today

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Saturday, September 06, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:22 Walked in to a group of husbands/fathers discussing the anatomical details of childbirth. Over breakfast. Not sure how to feel about it. #
  • 18:29 My six year old plays Battlechess. #
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Friday, September 05, 2008

follow up note


(Note: it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with these two things as they are both beloved by cool white people. Follow up note: these same things are hated by cooler white people).
Stuff White People Like

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 16:53 Alf Garnett was to Archie Bunker what David Brent is to Michael Scott. Youtube that shit. #
  • 17:59 trambopoline! #
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:04 It's pretty sobering the first time you notice that there are *scientists* younger than you. #
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Sunday, August 31, 2008

Lego Boba Fett


Tweets for Today

  • 14:46 "There's no teacher's edition of the universe" - Dr. Steve Novella #
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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Randal Schwartz


No, not Chris Bridges..


Crutcher telling the biggest panel at dragon*con that they suck.


Omfg, Erin Gray!


Tweets for Today

  • 11:20 From a distance, the word MCCAIN (in all caps like that) looks like the word WICCAN. #
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Friday, August 29, 2008

MST3K


No, not Sam Fleming


The Amazing Randi


Thursday, August 28, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 12:49 reading XKCD it hit me: holy shit, I have webhosting now.. I can make a webcomic! Now if I only I had any good ideas for one. #
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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

goodbye to love

The Carpenters have gone from being extremely popular (in the 70s), to be forgotten (in the 80s), to being regarded as kitsch (90s), to being so kitschy that they were cool again (also in the 90s), to being forgotten yet again.

Scott once posted something in the comments here that one of my guitar solos was kind of like the one in this song.. I'm not claiming to have ever done anything as good as this, and I admit I'd never heard it before.


Tuesday, August 26, 2008

damn i was a messed up teenager

While moving my old geocities (shudder..) site to my new domain name, I was reminded that it contains poetry written back at the very beginning of the 1990s, dating back to the bbs days and even before.

Literally more than half my life pass passed since I wrote this stuff. I'm surprised I still had it on the web; I put it on my first website when I was in college (at the urging of, yes, my mother!), and moved it from there to my first post-college ISP, and eventually dumped it onto geocities.

And holy fuck, is it pretentious. There's one where I use the word "mum" instead of "mom", because if you can make people think you're British they'll also think you're smart.

And weepy. Oh, the self-justified whine of it all.

The dishonesty. The moans of unrequited love, when I can damn well remember it was nothing but lust. But if you're going to write a poem about a girl and still be able to turn it in as homework for English class, it better be about love.

Somewhere around 1992, the Ayn Rand influence sets in.

But, occasionally, surprisingly close to the way I feel about stuff now. On a particularly rainy morning, at a time when I am tempted to spend all my waking hours thinking about the non-glory of my college years, I really needed to see this:

NOSTALGIA

Look at the old pictures,
remember where you were.
Sing the old songs,
remember who you were with.
Think the old thoughts.
You can't go back.
Does it hurt?
It always will.
And all the while,
the rain keeps falling outside.

Monday, August 25, 2008

title bin

Lunch Was Dinner and Dinner Was Supper

It Hurts, It Hurts, This Goddamn World

New glasses, even nerdier


Sunday, August 24, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:20 Live music in IKEA? #
  • 21:45 just realized I can add Bill Hicks to the list of celebrities that died younger than me. #
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Saturday, August 23, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:52 No matter how old I get I will always be younger than Kid Rock. #
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Friday, August 22, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 01:18 Its really not fair for Los Angeles, which is in the desert for cryin out loud, to be so much cooler than Atlanta is at this same hour. #
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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:52 Delta sells ad space on their boarding passes?! #
  • 18:45 made it thru security in time to have airport beer. #
  • 18:57 Turning "out of office" message off. Not gonna tolerate getting all these bounces sent to my blackberry for three days. #
  • 20:07 Everything in one carry-on == everything in the overhead bin == nothing under the seat in front of me! #
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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

stuff you think of on your birthday

Assuming I don't get to retire until I'm 67, I have 34 years of work left to do.

Thirty four years in this industry, at this time in history, is centuries in normal human time. 2042 will probably be more different from 2008 than 2008 is from 1974. Which is in turn more different than 1974 was from 1940.

In 2042, will we have computers? Will we be computers?

I doubt I'll have the luxury of working the same job, same company until 2042, even if I wanted to do such a thing.

Tweets for Today

  • 18:25 Carvel "Fudgie the Whale" ice cream cake! #
  • 20:51 Got me a gumbo cookin' woman #
  • 23:10 managed to cram two changes of clothes into my computer bag. #
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Best Of Dates, The Worst Of Dates

Wow, this is awesome.

java.util.Date Difference In Days

God, I hate Java's date libraries.

Monday, August 18, 2008

i can has podcast

For those who only read this site through RSS so you never see the links to the left, there is now one under the "flvxxvm florvm" section (which you haven't seen either) labeled "podcast (beta)". This is a podcast that will (I hope) be updated with a new song every time I record one. The RSS is generated by a perl script that does a directory listing of the directory where I stick these songs, every time it is called. It does not cache the results in a file or something. That's probably asking for a DOS attack right there.

The URL for direct copy/pasting is: http://www.jeff-robertson.com/flvxx/playlist/podcast.cgi

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 21:03 Rauchbier. Rauchbier? Rauchbier!! #
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Saturday, August 16, 2008

Korean autobiography of Bertrand Russell


Bakery cafe MAUM


Tweets for Today

  • 08:28 discovering harmonies I'd never heard before in 40 year old Beatles songs, just by hearing them on a stereo where only one channel works. #
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Friday, August 15, 2008

� End of PHP as an Apache Module? � Unofficial DreamHost Blog

PHP runs better as a CGI than as a module of the web server? The implications of this for environments like J2EE (where there is no option to run anything like a CGI) might be interesting.

Java's failure at shared hosting will contribute to its downfall

I did a google search for "shared java hosting", to check if somebody has recorded any wonderful experience he/she has had with java hosting on a shared environment. However I could not find anything except one blog by Stefan Mischook titled "Java hosting is kicking my ass!". He concludes by saying "Java is brittle in a shared environment, hard to configure and problematic - it sucks. I think this is a symptom of the Java community’s need to over-engineer everything and shows how Java is no longer suitable for small and medium size application development."


Part of what will probably be an ongoing series of postings about this topic.

Tweets for Today

  • 09:06 spent the last hour happily reading boing boing, thinking i didn't have any work email to deal with. then i remembered outlook wasn't up. #
  • 12:28 Add mindterm to the list of java apps that are truly competitive with native ones. It and limewire are the only non-IDEs on the list so far. #
  • 16:32 i'm probably gonna regret making a burrito from fixins' that have been sitting out since noon. #
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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Massive printer/plotter thing


Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Trying again..


Books purchased at the "media swap" at work


--------------------------
Sent using BlackBerry


Monday, August 11, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 20:56 i've never bothered to look to see if jeff-robertson.com was available, cuz I figured it couldn't possibly be. wtf? it is! or, it was! #
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Friday, August 08, 2008

Worst greeting card ever


Thursday, August 07, 2008

W. and me


Monday, August 04, 2008

Breakfast


Saturday, August 02, 2008

Its daddy/daughter day


Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 18:58 I am 100% sure it is not just that I'm old and jaded now. Chuck E. Cheese's is objectively lamer than it was in the eighties. #
  • 19:04 How the hell did a store where I just used my credit card get my email address? #
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Tweets for Today

  • 18:58 I am 100% sure it is not just that I'm old and jaded now. Chuck E. Cheese's is objectively lamer than it was in the eighties. #
  • 19:04 How the hell did a store where I just used my credit card get my email address? #
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Tweets for Today

  • 18:58 I am 100% sure it is not just that I'm old and jaded now. Chuck E. Cheese's is objectively lamer than it was in the eighties. #
  • 19:04 How the hell did a store where I just used my credit card get my email address? #
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Tweets for Today

  • 18:58 I am 100% sure it is not just that I'm old and jaded now. Chuck E. Cheese's is objectively lamer than it was in the eighties. #
  • 19:04 How the hell did a store where I just used my credit card get my email address? #
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Paper cup inside mug


Tuesday, July 29, 2008

We'll help, Meatloaf! But HOW!?



Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Serious Pie in Seattle


Breakfast


Plink your sink


Monday, July 28, 2008

leave the swiss army knife alone

In certain circles, particularly when someone is trying to make an argument in favor of "do one thing and do it well" in terms of computer programs, it is fashionable to bash the swiss army knife.

Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It is only the latest place where this turns up.

on camping trips, Swiss Army knives are ideal. Luggage space is often at a premium, and such a tool will be useful in a range of expected and even unexpected situations. In situations when versatility and space constraints are less important, however, a Swiss Army knife is comparatively a fairly poor knife—and an equally awkward magnifying glass, saw, and scissors. qv


Quit picking on the poor swiss army knife. It was good enough for MacGuyver. Also, good enough for the Swiss Army. Why do you think nobody ever messes with Switzerland? (Well, that and shooting arrows through apples on top of people's heads)

Thursday, July 24, 2008

redesign coming..

I am getting pretty tired of the design of this place. Expect it to change drastically.

title bin

Some phrases I intend to use as song titles, eventually. Some of these I've been working on for years and haven't finished; some are new.

Dead Malls of America
Carterfone
Cornbread (Ugliest Girl in Bayou La Batre)

Tweets for Today

  • 08:08 Our chief weapon is surprise.. surprise and fear.. fear and surprise.. and Outlook. #
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Chef Pete's

.. is a cajun/barbecue restaurant up in Gwinnett, located next to a bowling alley. The sign out front says:



"You can't beat Pete's meat".

There is a sign inside that says "You don't need teeth to eat our meat".



The staff also wear shirts with "You don't need teeth to eat Pete's meat". We asked to buy some of the shirts, but our waitress claimed that they were all sold out after a "gay bowling tournament" (her words).

every freakin' day

At approximately 8:55 AM I get the exact same spam about XXX Angelina Jolie videos, only Angelina is misspelled slightly differently every time. It's funny because it pretends to be from Microsoft.

Bug 446704 – "This might void your warranty!" is not appreciated by corporate customers


Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Mnemonic Phone Numbers and the Numerical Keypad - BlackBerryForums.com


Monday, July 21, 2008

commercials that ruined classical music for me, part 2

Well, if you count Christmas carols as "classical". Close enough.


commercials that ruined classical music for me, part 1

.. and now are about to ruin it for you. This is a special gift from me to all you people who are either too young or too old to remember the 1980s. You better believe this is just part one!




Thursday, July 17, 2008

spoken song intro of the day

"Here we go now: A sociology lecture, with a bit of psychology, a bit of neurology, a bit of fuckology; no fun." -- Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols, "No Fun"

Tweets for Today

  • 16:49 I just watched this tinyurl.com/2slqeu with the sound off, listening to "Seek and Destroy" by Metallica instead. #
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:27 It's a burrito, and I'm eating it for breakfast. Does that mean it's a breakfast burrito? #
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

classification of aging geeks by childhood exposure to bowdlerized anime

You probably know that in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of Japanese anime properties were Americanized: dubbed, renamed, edited, censored, sculpted, and packaged for the consumption of American kids.

I'm no expert on anime, but these are the ones I know about. I won't bother with their Japanese names.

Battle of the Planets
Robotech
Tranzor-Z
Star Blazers
Voltron

Now, here's the thing. Not all American kids were exposed to all of them. Most of them aired in syndication, which means their existence and air time in any particular market were purely a local matter.

The only one of these that I ever saw as a kid was Voltron, with the exception of seeing one episode of Battle of the Planets when we were on vacation in Mississippi (The idea of taking a vacation in Mississippi may seem strange to some of you; I will eventually get around to explaining it).

I believe that every adult American geek saw at least one of these as a child, and that his or her future personality was shaped by it. Voltron people are different from Battle of the Planets people, etc. It's like signs of the zodiac.

Voltron people, because of that whole Lion Voltron vs. Vehicle Voltron thing, are inherently schizophrenic. We cannot decide between the two Voltrons. The mysticism and romanticism of the Lion Voltron, in which ghosts and witches are just as real as spaceships, and actual non-figureheaded monarchy is the obviously natural form of government for both baddies and goodies; versus Vehicle Voltron, with it's rationalist Star Trek like vision of the future, it's collapse-of-the-evil-empire-from-within Cold War plot, and it's constant reminders that the reason humanity is having to search for new planets is because Earth is overcrowded and polluted or something. The ideal of the heroic as held up by Lion Voltron is that of the medieval Knight (like the Jedi). The ideal of Vehicle Voltron is the Solider-Scientist (like Star Fleet). We Voltron People were raised to believe in both of these; it keeps us from being able to pick a side in Star Wars vs. Star Trek and sticking with it. It makes our choices of political candidate very difficult.

I don't know enough about the other shows to similarly describe them. Except that Battle of the Planets People are likely to be from Mississippi. And Star Blazers allegedly had people actually die in it, which probably means that the people who watched it ended up being goth or something.

Tweets for Today

  • 14:16 yes, as a matter of fact I am wearing a pocket protector #
  • 18:36 wearing ridulous amounts of sunscreen #
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Monday, July 14, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 02:24 fortune cookie say: "an interesting musical opportunity is in your near future" #
  • 13:41 At perimeter mall. They're lined up like crazy outside the Apple store. I'm just here for the food court. #
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Sunday, July 13, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 20:47 I'm so sunburned I look like a red devil. A fat red devil. #
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Friday, July 11, 2008

another story that the kids are never going to believe

In the period from approximately 1986 to 1991, glam-metal was such a dominant force in the world of rock that literally all hard rock was covered by the press* as being "metal". Black Crowes? Metal. Drivin' N' Cryin'? Metal. Janes Addiction? Metal. You get the idea.

*For the purpose of this blog post, "the press" includes mostly guitar magazines and poster magazines**. I wasn't smart enough to read things like Rolling Stone so I don't know how they handled it.

** Defined as magazine which might contain articles but whose real purpose is posters of rock bands for kids to decorate their rooms with. Basically the non-sexual version of pinups.. does this type of publication even still exist?

Tweets for Today

  • 09:09 this better fucking update facebook.. #
  • 09:18 Twitter is way too vital a service for it to be allowed to have service outages and turn features off. It should be nationalized. #
  • 09:28 Farting up the ie8 beta for the first time. Yeah, I know.. I'm late to the party. #
  • 09:42 IE8 was worth it, if for no other reason than leading to me reading this: tinyurl.com/5otk5v #
  • 12:51 Why is cantaloupe encountered on buffets and salad bars so much more frequently than honeydew melon? Honeydew kicks cantaloupe's ass. #
  • 21:18 "What's for lunch?" "Next!!" "Chicken next?" #
  • 22:02 "Lisa the Vegetarian" would be A pretty good Simpsons episode if it didn't have all that damned vegetarianism in it. #
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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 16:38 "What, are you gonna read People Magazine and eat at Wendy's til the end of time? Take a fucking chance!" - George Carlin #
  • 18:53 Woot, the shell station where i buy redbull and porkrinds has mexican coke #
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Monday, July 07, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 09:12 How have I been using UNC paths since 1995 without learning that you can put user:password just like urls? \\server\share@user:pass.. wtf?! #
  • 09:20 oh now I know why... because the webpage that just told me you could do that was wrong. sigh. #
  • 11:50 it's good to know that in spite of all the ways my blackberry does not display web pages very well, it does in fact support animated gifs. #
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Friday, July 04, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 23:27 montgomery chan 12 news ticker: "actor beyond bozo has dies". (exact quote) #
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 23:48 Sooner or later I always return toi my true mistressh: scattered, covered, smothered, chunked, diced... #
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Monday, June 30, 2008

Your annual dose of Orwell

"Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war while wanting to preserve the kind of society that makes war inevitable." - July 14, 1944

Friday, June 27, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 01:28 2 things I should be ashamed of as a south alabamian: never eating a raw oyster before yesterday; and drinking yankee-ass "moxie" soda. #
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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 22:00 Seattle's streets are entirely free of park benches, except at bus stops. My guess is they know they'd just be full of homeless people. #
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:13 i dreamed of weird food: canned whole crocodile, endorsed by the king of spain. #
  • 12:03 Does the fact that my mood improves noticeably when I eat mean I'm permanently on the food/shelter rung of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? #
  • 12:15 There is no such a thing as a worst case scenario.. no matter how bad you think things might get, they could get even worse. #
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:09 I dreamed one of the major Marvel or DC villains was crazy b/c as a child they dressed him as a bunny to hide him from the nazis. #
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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:55 At a restaurant that serves goat. #
  • 15:17 goat is having its revenge from beyond the grave #
  • 15:41 I have become that which I used to fear: a fat sweaty bald man in a polo shirt, walking down the street in the hot southern sun. #
  • 22:25 @Quinbot no i mean new age shaving "creams" that are more like lotion than soap. lotion don't lather up no matter how much you rub it. #
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Saturday, June 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:59 Wtf is the deal with foamless shaving cream? #
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Friday, June 20, 2008

best bookmarklet evar. better than "blog this".

Drag this to you toolbar.

Irish I Were Drunk

EDIT: don't use it on gmail.

EDIT: I know it doesn't work in IE.

EDIT: changed to keep original image size.

Tweets for Today

  • 08:29 today is "see how long i can use windows with no shell" day #
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Thursday, June 19, 2008

Java ME Open Source Software - SSH, Telnet, VNC


VNC2Go - A Mobile (Midlet) VNC Viewer Client

"VNC2Go is a VNC client (viewer) that runs on MIDP-enabled devices. It lets you control any desktop server running a VNC service, from any mobile device that supports Java Midlets, such as mobile phones and PDAs."

If this actually works, it could be the most useful thing anybody had ever done with Java, ever.

MIDP Terminal Emulation, Part 1: A Simple Emulator MIDlet

Scott, you were wondering the other day if it would be possible to telnet to unix servers from a blackberry. I think that's what this is.

streetview!!


Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 16:59 a watched jboss boils slower. seriously, i think it really does runs faster (on xp at least) when the cmd.exe running it is minimized. #
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Monday, June 16, 2008

ok, one more rock and roll post before the meetings start

Don't let extreme metal purists fool you: some of that goofy 80s hair metal actually did kick serious ass.

For proof, I suggest the early Motley Crue albums.

Really anything before "Home Sweet Home" kicked off the power ballad craze. When every leather-clad bunch of glam metal boys in America trying to outdo each other at the game of imitating Journey and REO Speedwagon for fun and profit. That was the death spiral that nearly killed rock and roll. We're extremely lucky that "alternative" rock was there to pick up the torch because otherwise there would have been no rock on the top 40 and MTV at all between about 1992 and whenever things like the White Stripes started to pop.

But that doesn't mean that "Too Fast For Love" doesn't rock.

pseudo-review: "Roller", April Wine, 1979

(youtube link)

I know very little about April Wine's music other than this one song. Based on just this one song, I would classify them as sort of a Canadian version of Foghat. That statement, based mostly on ignorance, could possibly anger fans of both April Wine and Foghat, but I ain't scared.

The song opens with a guitar riff similar to Rush's "finding my way". This makes me suspect that this song is probably pretty much what Rush would have been up to by this time if Neil Peart had never joined the band.

After about 15 seconds and some screaming, the song gets down to business. The chunga-chung-chung rhythm is a positively eerie foreshadowing of the much-later hit "Man, I feel like a woman" by fellow Canadian Shania Twain. No, I am not joking. That's really what it sounds like.

When the verses start, that's when the Foghat similarity comes in. Although the vocalist of this band screams more or less like any 70's Robert Plant imitator during the intro, when he actually sings the sound comes out extremely "Fool for the City".

This was apparently April Wine's biggest U.S. success and the song that finally got them some play down south after a decade of Canadian existence. I can probably attribute that to the fact that the lyrics are not about anything even remotely Canadian, but instead deal with Las Vegas, the city that's more American than America.

The solo is the real standout of this song, and is everything 70s. Dueling lead guitars, phase shifters, creepy long delays, and more pull-offs than (insert some kind of joke about somebody having sex with a bunch of groupies here).

That "flying saucer taking off" effect after the solo and before the last verse sounds like one of those things I've heard a million times but can't actually name any of them when put on the spot.

The ending sounds a lot like Led Zepplin's "How Many More Times", which is faintly ironic considering how derivative that song itself is generally considered to be.

If you think this is a negative review, then you don't know me. This song has "guilty pleasure" written all over it, and if there's one thing I indulge in without a hint of guilt, it's guilty pleasures.

On my particular iPod this particular morning, the song is randomly followed by Paul Simon's "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes".