Sorry for the lack of updates here / attention to email / attendance on Skype etc / for those who’ve noticed.
Very busy, don’t take it personally. Might take me some time to catch up.
Uh, of course I haven’t had time to watch the new Eva movie …
I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully imported all posts and comments from this blog into a new system. While I’m still unsure as to when that’s going to go live, I hope it’s soon - I’m sick of this blog. I mean just look at it! Ugly as hell. And so fucking common.
Anyway, looking forward to rm -rf’ing wordpress once and for all. Tally-ho!
Off topic but not really worthy of another post is a small annoyance I have with people talking about randomness in UUIDs. I often hear this quote bandied about as some sort of “proof” that UUID collisions will never occur:
1 trillion UUIDs would have to be created every nanosecond for 10 billion years to exhaust the number of UUIDs
This is a useless factoid which, while sounding superficially impressive, has no relevance to actual use of UUIDs. For starters - there’s no central authority tracking UUID use. Even in internal projects there’s usually nothing tracking their use. Most projects that I’m aware of have none, zero, zip duplicate protection or even detection. Not that this is a big problem, as this example a little further down the same Wikipedia page explains:
[..] after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years, the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%
Now admittedly that’s still a pretty unlikely event. Assuming you have a decent generator, you shouldn’t lose any sleep that your UUIDs are colliding .. or ever will in your lifetime. But 1 billion a second for 100 years is a lot less that 1 trillion a nanosecond for 10 billion years. Don’t just wave away about 15 orders of magnitude just to make a point.
In an effort to give my blog more “bling”, I’ve enabled rainbow-coloured animated links.
Inspired by Do Your BEST!, whose QT4 tutorials I’ve been reading.
UPDATE: Found them infuriating and removed. Also reduced font size, which has gotten screwed up somehow.
This WIRED article about Ray Kurzweil’s visions of the singularity is pretty good. But I learned something that wasn’t about the future: apparently you can now have “a speculation”:
Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement.
Fascinating. This can join “a good value” in my list of recent noun-izations in English about which I had no idea until experiencing the Fait Accompli of reading them in mainstream media.
On another note, I upgraded WP to 2.5.0, which broke code highlighting on the front page. Until I get it fixed, if you’re trying to read some code, just click on the post title - it still works on subpages. I normally wouldn’t have upgraded immediately but I wanted password hashing. The rest of it is slightly improved, I suppose, though in a hilarious continuation of WP’s famously lax attitude towards security - it asks for server login credentials to “auto-update” plugins!
You can also see some SVN detritus around the place, I’ll clean it up when I have time.
So, I’m writing blog software, and one of the obvious things I want to do is import from this blog. As a first step towards that, I export the entire contects using WP’s export tool (after purging more than 17,000 comment spams since I last manually purged) and this is what it looks like (previous post to this):
<item> <title>Interesting words in your OSX Dictionary</title> <link>http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/03/11/fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary/</link> <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:03:46 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Sho</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Language]]></category> <category><![CDATA[leopard]]></category> <category><![CDATA[mac]]></category> <category domain="tag"><![CDATA[dictionary]]></category> <category domain="tag"><![CDATA[esquivalience]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/03/11/fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary/</guid> <description></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Using Leopard? Try this. Look up the word esquivalience by selecting it and choosing dictionary from the contextual menu. Read the dictionary definition, then the wikipedia one underneath : )]]></content:encoded> <wp:post_id>713</wp:post_id> <wp:post_date>2008-03-11 12:03:46</wp:post_date> <wp:post_date_gmt>2008-03-11 03:03:46</wp:post_date_gmt> <wp:comment_status>open</wp:comment_status> <wp:ping_status>open</wp:ping_status> <wp:post_name>fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary</wp:post_name> <wp:status>publish</wp:status> <wp:post_parent>0</wp:post_parent> <wp:menu_order>0</wp:menu_order> <wp:post_type>post</wp:post_type> </item>
Jesus, that is *horrible*. Firstly, if the post_type is defined only towards the end, what’s with the post_id, post_date, post_name etc? It’s a post - of post_type post! Secondly, where’s the “updated at” field? What’s the “dc:” namespace for the creator tag only? What’s with having an “isPermalink” switch in the guid tag? The permalink is in the link tag, I presume. Why does it need to be content:encoded when obviously the content is CDATA - implying that WP somehow supports XML parsing inside some contents!? Why is pubDate camelCase while everything else is underline_style? Man, I hate camelCase. Etc etc. What a mess.
I know what you’re thinking: that’s just RSS format! Sure it’s ugly, it’s RSS! Well, no. The RSS is similar but different for this post - I examined the feed for that, too. Note that the description is empty, it isn’t in the RSS. So they’re using a modified RSS format to store internal data. If they’re not going to store description, but just generate it on the fly - why export empty description tags?!
Just for comparison, here’s the much nicer atom feed. Obviously doesn’t have all the wp: internal data, but I much prefer the design:
<entry> <author> <name>Sho</name> <uri>http://fukamachi.org/</uri> </author> <title type="html"><![CDATA[Interesting words in your OSX Dictionary]]></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/03/11/fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary/" /> <id>http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/03/11/fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary/</id> <updated>2008-03-11T03:04:31Z</updated> <published>2008-03-11T03:03:46Z</published> <category scheme="http://fukamachi.org/wp" term="Language" /> <category scheme="http://fukamachi.org/wp" term="leopard" /> <category scheme="http://fukamachi.org/wp" term="mac" /> <category scheme="http://fukamachi.org/wp" term="dictionary" /> <category scheme="http://fukamachi.org/wp" term="esquivalience" /> <summary type="html"><![CDATA[ Using Leopard? Try this. Look up the word esquivalience by selecting it and choosing dictionary from the contextual menu. Read the dictionary definition, then the wikipedia one underneath : )]]></summary> <content type="html" xml:base="http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/03/11/fake-words-in-your-osx-dictionary/"> <![CDATA[ <p>Using Leopard? Try this. Look up the word esquivalience by selecting it and choosing dictionary from the contextual menu. Read the dictionary definition, then the wikipedia one underneath : )</p>]]> </content> </entry>
Note logical, consistent design, self-closing tags, and other innovations.
UPDATE: Check out the comment format:
<wp:comment> <wp:comment_id>3</wp:comment_id> <wp:comment_author><![CDATA[nigger cock]]></wp:comment_author> <wp:comment_author_email>gay@nigger.cock.org</wp:comment_author_email> <wp:comment_author_url>http://nigger.org/</wp:comment_author_url> <wp:comment_author_IP>127.0.0.1</wp:comment_author_IP> <wp:comment_date>2005-07-16 10:23:48</wp:comment_date> <wp:comment_date_gmt>2005-07-16 14:23:48</wp:comment_date_gmt> <wp:comment_content>Hey, is this that new gay nigger cock website I've been hearing about?</wp:comment_content> <wp:comment_approved>1</wp:comment_approved> <wp:comment_type></wp:comment_type> <wp:comment_parent>0</wp:comment_parent> </wp:comment>
The comment author is CDATA, but the content isn’t? WTF?
As all server admins know, any upgrade that ends with a successful boot is a good upgrade. Well, here we are again, after a RAM upgrade and reboot which exposed a couple of failing-to-start services - failures which made me glad I’d stayed up til 4am to oversee the upgrade (albeit from the other side of the world) and make sure everything was OK. I’ll also be reviewing my configuration to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Anyway, we’re now running with a full 4GB of RAM - the limit for this box. The expansion is in preparation for a number of web sites hosted on this box which will go live shortly, all in Rails, which is a ginormous RAM hog. I’ll now be able to safely boost the number of Rails instances I can simultaneously serve without running out of memory, which I’ve done before in testing, and which caused horrendous performance problems.
The upgrade will also enable continued experimentation with virtualisation upon this RHEL4 box. I’d been playing around with running RHEL5 on top of it, but 2GB of memory wasn’t a large enough play area - the extra headroom will give me more room and enable me to trial a number of things I’ve had in mind.
Anyway, big sighs of relief that the HD didn’t fail (which I basically expect whenever a server which has run continuously for a year is suddenly powered off) and I won’t have to restore from backup, which would have been a very stressful 24 hours.
Onwards and upwards, then!
As discovered by Wincent the ruby mail console Sup is looking great. Ah, the memories .. it’s just like running elm (or pine) back in 1993! Except, way better, and it can do mbox over remote. I can see myself coming to love this.
Just a couple of small problems - the lack of unicode, and the fact that it stores your ssh passwords in plaintext in ~/.sup/sources.yaml.
Still, glorious days and as of now the most 1337 way to check your mail, bar none.
I may as well use this entry to also announce that I’m retiring my gmail accounts - and the advent of cool tools like this to access mbox-based mail only speeds my wish to migrate. I no longer trust gmail, and prefer to host my own mail servers.
My old gmail address will still work indefinitely, but replies may come from a different domain. I might also change my DNS over in the next few days so I can add SPF records, there might be some disruption but only temporarily.
A number of recent posts here have attracted unwanted attention from the exact sort of internet time-wasters I usually spend considerable effort avoiding - and they’ve sucked me in to wasting any number of hours responding to their nuisance-making, more fool me. Accordingly, I’ve deleted all relevant articles and comments, hoping that by removing their food, the trolls will disappear. Any further comment activity will be deleted without reading or reply.
Now, hopefully normal service will resume!
I don’t do things by halves. If I’m running a poll to discover the cutest animal in all the world, I don’t just let it run a day or a week, or even a month. I run it for over a year. Well over a year.
The site poll for “cutest animal” has been running for 600 Days, since 16th October 2005. I think we can consider that a sufficient period to collect vital data on this most important of questions. And now, the results:
Official Cutest Animal
Wombat, with an overwhelming 14 votes
2nd cutest animal
tied between Shane Warne and the Octopus (8 votes)
3rd cutest animal
Bunny (7 votes)
A new poll is imminent.
Boards of Canada, Dayvan Cowboy
chicas
hold your tears lyrics clazziquai english
Girls Fucking Animals — wtf?? i think this is referral spam
love mode clazziquai project lyrics
Sho Fukamachi
one winged angel
JAPANESE GHOST PICS
Salesman CLAZZIQUAI PROJECT lyric
girls fucking animals — same here
www.trueghoststories.com
japanese ghost images
1pondo 1280 — heh heh looking for PRON eh?
charmmy kitty pictures — sicko
my life billy joel lyrics
ANIMALS FUCK
石川梨華
animals fuck with girls
石川梨華
charmmy kitty
sho fukamachi
石川梨華
li yu chun supergirl
rika ishikawa
rie fu
浮舟 鳴り止まない
clazziquai sweety lyrics translation
石川梨華
浮舟 7188
浮舟 7188
bittorrentcurses options
looking for u left me long and clear lyrics
Lyrics clazziquai project salesman I Hope you know
base.rb:1358: syntax error
japanese mirror ghost
/active_record/base.rb:1358
i’m seventeen and i’m new here today the village i come from seems so far away
animals fucking
mongrel “ram usage”
Fukamachi — this person has class.
chicas
base36 ruby
base.rb:1358
“ipod inside her” lyrics — lol
girls that fuck animals
japanese ghost pictures
love mode ft verbal lyric
she is lyrics by clazziquai (korea)
“all was well”は
japanese ghost pictures
rika fukamachi — omg YES
rika fukamachi
life on mars lyric
one winged angel
mr salesman lyrics
go!go!7188 lyrics japanese
japanese ghost pictures
japanese pictures of ghost
etc etc etc … notice how none of these people are looking for something *I* wrote. Ah well!