Archive for September, 2007

Mark Isham inspired by Kanno Yoko

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Has anyone else seen the recent Nicholas Cage movie, Next?

Did you recognise the scores’ obvious “inspiration” from Kanno Yoko’s Ghost in the Shell score?

The item from the score plays during the opening credits. I don’t have the OST yet but I’ll get it. The copied track is “To tell the Truth”, from Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex O.S.T. 2.

UPDATE 1: upon listening again, I believe it is also similar to the Harry Gregson-Williams score for Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow, specifically the title track Greenland Anno 1859 which I have a copy of but can’t get at the moment (it’s in Adelaide), and amazingly oink doesn’t seem to have.

Anyway, that seems to be the similar song I’m thinking of, which shares the distinctive two-chord piano line. They’re all similar songs, and I have no doubt that all have influenced the others – I know Kanno is a fan of Gregson-Williams.

MP3 1: 8:09 by Mark Isham – listen from about 1:10 in if you’re impatient

MP3 2: To Tell the Truth by Kanno Yoko – about a minute in, but listen to the whole thing, this is a great song

Posted in music | No Comments »

Deletions

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

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!

Posted in Sho Fukamachi Online | No Comments »

81 Windows Updates

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

A mere 81 Updates

Decided to check out VMWare Fusion today, in the lame hope it supports half-life. Went for a new install of XP “Free Edition” and did a double-take at the 81 updates it wanted to install! And that was after it had already rebooted once after some earlier, unknown number of updates. Ridiculous, but at least it can do them all together.

In other update news, our beloved WordPress has moved to 2.3, so I’ve dutifully updated that, too. The tagging system is very welcome indeed – but it seems we now have tags AND categories. Which one should I use? Regardless, I relish the opportunity to henceforth pollute the internet with gratuitous slashdot-style joke tags on everything I write.

There was some controversy about the new WP update system, sending identifying information to wordpress.org, but having examined the data sent it seems reasonable to me. If you don’t trust WP.org, after all, maybe you shouldn’t be running WP. Oh, wait …

Tags: automattic, easytoaddtags, fuckdatshit, , tags, updates, windows, wordpress
Posted in technology | 2 Comments »

Definition of Bully Seeding

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

I can’t believe there is for this important term.

Bully Seeding is the practise by which someone with extremely good internet connectivity monopolises the entire upload activity for a BitTorrent “cloud” on a ratio-counting tracker.

Usually, such a person, having such a good connection, has no need of the upload credit such activity generates, but does it anyway, to the deprivation of the genuinely needy, slower-connected folks whose pitiful attempts to compete with his disproportionately fat pipe meet with nought but failure.

Posted in internet | No Comments »

My first internet admirer!

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

It’s taken long enough but I finally have a fan! In a lengthy love letter, Nazi blog “Private Intelligence” thoroughly endorses me, my blog, my comments policy, my comments, my image use and attribution policy, my opinions on WordPress and pretty much everything else, and Hitler. After some quick telepathic communication with the racist owner of “Private Intelligence” I’ve obtained permission to post the entire article right after the jump, translated from its original German. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Due to a DMCA complaint (I am not kidding, the owner of Private Intelligence actually sent one) I’ve removed the translated article. Of course there was no merit whatsoever, but I don’t want to piss off my kind host.

UPDATE 2: Check out my admirer’s new 1700-word essay on this very subject, espeically if you’re having trouble sleeping, right here. Note how the “private intellectual” doesn’t seem quite “intellectual” enough to correctly implement permalinks on his outdated WordPress blog!

Tags: funny
Posted in Sho Fukamachi Online, external reference, internet | 13 Comments »

graffiti in my httpd.conf

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

So, you want to break up your httpd.conf file, because it’s too damn long, but you don’t want to split it into a bunch of little includes because then it’s even more unweildy?

Why not do what I do, and put huge graffiti all through it so visually scrolling through it is much easier.

Easy to miss the start of the VirtualHost section when it’s just a tiny line in your editor. But much harder to miss this:

httpd-vhosts

You can use this site to make them! Don’t forget to comment it out!

Posted in programming | 1 Comment »

Auto Migrations

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

I have a love/hate relationship with Rails’ “Migrations” system. While it’s fantastically useful, and absolutely necessary if you’re ever planning on changing your schema after going live, I find it incredibly fiddly and annoying creating and modifying all those little files. They’re all numbered, you basically have to make a new file (and add to subversion) every single time you make a DB change – which is all the fucking time.

So I never end up using it. I *should* but I don’t. Isn’t that always the way. What I always end up doing is just making the changes directly in the DB, then exporting the DB schema to schema.rb, copying it into a big first migration, using that, and always having this plan to switch to migrations sometime after I’ve finished active development – I just can’t stand it getting in the way all the time before then.

So imagine my delight at Err The Blog’s latest plugin – “Auto Migrations”. Here’s the deal – you maintain one big schema file, which you already have in schema.rb, and whenever you change it you run the plugin – it looks at the DB, sees if anything needs to be added, removed, or indexed – and does it. One file. No more little migrations files. But you retain the ability to do live, in-place updates.

Fucking Brilliant. This is exactly what I wanted, and I didn’t even realise it. Take a look here. Tested and working for me. This kind of shit is exactly why I love Rails.

Posted in programming, rails | 3 Comments »

Upgrading Apache, MySQL and PHP on RHEL4 the FUN way

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

UPDATE: You know what? Fuck, double fuck and triple fuck doing that shit by hand. I ended up scrapping all my work, uninstalling practically everything, adding http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL4/x86_64/ to my yum repository, and just installing from there.

Worked first fucking time.

I wouldn’t mind spending whole days crawling through dependency hell if I was, say, in prison and had nothing else to do but understand the minutiae of lib-apr.so linking. But I’m not in prison, I’ve got a lot to do, and so being able to install, say, apache 2.2 (the whole reason I started on this mission) in 5 minutes instead of 15 hours is pretty fucking compelling.

I like compiling from source and doing it myself. But trying to manually coax 3 or 4 co-dependent software system to play nicely is just too fucking hard. In the end it was subversion that did it – I fucking could not get it to talk to Apache. Hours of searching, trying what I found – useless, and potentially damaging.

Using 3rd-party RPMs is inherently a matter of trust. But using 3rd party software is also a matter of trust. I trust Apache to not contain hidden rootkits, even though I haven’t personally audited every line of source. In the same way, I trust the RPMs of the above repository to not have been tampered with. In the absence of unlimited time and manpower, that’s the only smart option I see to upgrade anything complex on a RHEL system.

You can read the original outdated entry if you want by clicking below.

(more…)

Posted in programming | 3 Comments »

APEC 2007

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

The city’s in total lockdown:

Apec Lockdown

But the best thing so far about having APEC in Sydney has been the hilarious stunts pulled by The Chaser. Their infiltration of the security zone, posing as a Canadian government delegation, to deliver a fake Osama Bin Laden won’t be screened until next week, but they started well before then. Until then, I recommend the preceding episode, which can be downloaded from here (87M).

And remember, all The Chaser’s output, being a production of the ABC using my tax dollars, is available free from the abc website – of their “vodcast” downloads in mp4 format. Great stuff.

Tags: funny
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Volume Header Needs Minor Repair

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

My five favourite fucking words in the world, and I always look forward to seeing them after a hard reset! And it’s good I look forward to seeing them, because I always fucking see them!

So, Apple, your journalling does .. what? Certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much, you know, journalling or anything.

And I love this article telling us it’s OK to ignore these “minor” problems when journalling is on .. oh, that only applies to 10.3.9 or earlier. Well, I guess I’d better go and fucking boot off the fucking DVD again!

ZFS can’t come soon enough! Can’t wait to boot off a filesystem that’s been designed to, you know, not ceremoniously shoot itself in the head every chance it gets. Journalled HFS+! The only fucking journal I’m seeing is my god damn journal of disk errors. What the fuck kind of journal is that bastard FS writing anyway?

HFS+ Journal Sept 4, 2007
Dear Journal, Fucked up the header again!!! LOL

Tags:
Posted in rant | 2 Comments »