Tired gardener

Spent most of the day doing major cleanup in the yard, had to clear the underbrush away from the sprinklers and remove the buildup of dead ferns and prune or tie the fuchsia a bit here and there and weed-whack here and there with my widdle electwic weed whacker.

So foo. Anyhow, here's my computer screen this morning. The Macbook is in lozenge mode (that silvery thing over to the right). The big server that runs Windows 7 and Centos 6.2 (in a VirtualBox VM, it handles the RAID arrays because Linux is the universal solvent of networks, capable of providing filesystems to both Windows and Mac systems in their native protocols) is that big black box below it. That's a 25" monitor. The keyboard is an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard, and the trackpad beside it is an Apple MagicPad multi-touch thingy that I like because it lets me go swipe-swipe-swipe and do all sorts of things depending on how many fingers and what direction I'm swiping (and the whole trackpad is a button -- it has two little feet that also serve as buttons below it). Atop the sound system on the shelf above the desk are the keyboard and mouse for the big server, I usually RDP in from the Macbook using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client for MacOS (I have the Linux VM set to start up in the background so I RDP to it too). To the right, out of picture, is the big HP printer-scanner-copier that I barely use nowadays.

Just feeling geeky. Something to do while tired, heh.

-- Badtux the Tired Garden Penguin(*)
(*) Not to be confused with a garden gnome, penguins are much more handsome!

A few more notes

1) Outlook is a great calendaring program, it's a great program for managing your contacts list, it's a wonderful TODO list program. But only Microsoft could produce an email program that, well, sucks at actual email. My employer uses a proxied Exchange server and every damned time I fire up Outlook, the damned thing prompts me for my email password, despite the fact that I told it to remember the password last time I fired up Outlook!. Apple Mail doesn't do that, despite the fact that it's using Microsoft's code to talk to Exchange (Apple licensed the code to do so from Microsoft). It properly remembers my password. So anyhow, the *other* issue I'm having with Outlook is that occasionally it just decides to not update my message counts. I look at 'Favorites', where I've dragged the Inbox of all my email accounts, and it shows no emails. Then I click on, say, the badtux Inbox, and suddenly it shows I have two emails -- that arrived an hour ago but I never got any sort of notification!

So anyhow, Thunderbird isn't an adequate substitute because our Exchange server doesn't export LDAP for the contacts list, and like most high tech employers, the names of many of our employees (first.last convention for email names) are unspellable by native English speakers. Grrr!

2) I have a *fine* string of music waiting for you this week, mostly folks who've never been on this blog before, and most of'em are good. So y'all come back now, y'hear?

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

This is fucking hilarious

From a thread on a review of an iPhone ad (seriously! Yes, a review of an AD!):

by Grigsby_51 March 17, 2011 6:50 AM PDT
 How about, "If you don't have an iPhone you might have a normal sex life"

by AdonisLUV March 17, 2011 7:00 AM PDT
 Only if you consider abstinence a normal sex life.

by make_or_break March 17, 2011 7:09 AM PDT
 "Only if you consider abstinence a normal sex life..."

 So tell us AdonisLUV...what other love devices besides the iPhone do you need
 to get it on? Oh wait...never mind...we don't need to know, or even want to
guess. Definitely that would be too much information...

by OniOokamiAlfador March 17, 2011 7:29 AM PDT   How about, "If you don't have an iPhone you might have a normal sex life"

  -or-

  Only if you consider abstinence a normal sex life.

 ------

 I'm trying really hard to figure out which of these comments is more
 ridiculous. If having a certain phone affects your sex life one way or
 another, you have way more serious issues than that, on a deeply personal
 level.

Heh. Yeah. Exactly.

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

Large Hadron Collider now operating

World disappears into massive black hole. News at 5.

-- Badtux the Snarky Science Penguin

Stupidity not America-only trait

Australian minister says gamers are scarier than bikers. Because those gamer bars are such terrifying places. Why, you go into one of them, and you see all these pale geeks with huge bulging mouse-clicker muscles hanging around ready to, err, frag you. In a virtual world. In real world, speak harshly to them and they might piss their pants.

Seems to me that South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson is going to have some up close and personal encounters with irate outlaw motorcycle gang members real soon now. Because calling a bunch of hairy malcontent outlaw bikers accustomed to getting into fights in bars and who would sooner knife you than say hello less scary than a bunch of computer geeks with all the muscle tone of a bowl of jello whose sole weapon is a mouse clicker can't be flattering to the hairy malcontents...

Or maybe the jello-muscled geeks actually are scarier than the hairy violent outlaw bikers. In some universe. In some universe where unicorns are real, and fragging can be accomplished merely by shouting Lightning bolt! at the top of your lungs...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Mood: Curmudgeon.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

And I haff POWER!

Over the weekend my old power supply in my Linux server failed, so I had to buy a new one today. I just finished putting it into the box -- it's a Corsair TX750W power supply. Not a big deal, just tedious to get it in there. Only real problem is that it doesn't have a fan control power output, so the fans on my Antec case *howl*. I gotta do something about that, all that racket is nerve-wracking...

I am in major hack mode right now, churning out entire subsystems per day, so don't have anything more interesting to blog at the moment. Will blog another health care post shortly -- there is just SO much misinformation out there, and there's a massive new proposed bill in the House that needs some careful study but it takes *time* to read 850(!) pages of legalese...

Oh yeah, right-wing fail for the day: I got a frantic email from one of my right-wing mailing lists about how ObamaCare was actually, uhm... A PLOT TO TAKE OUR GUNS AWAY!

For real. Seriously! Now, you can go look at the bill yourself and see that there is not a single reference in there to "gun", "firearm,", or "weapon" of any kind, but that's facts, and the right wing Depends squad is too busy shitting their pants over imagined threats to bother with measly little things like facts...

Sigh. Better idiots, please?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

A comment about Twitter

I was skeptical. But Twitter has been a quite interesting way to encounter other ideas, other people to have interesting discussions with, etc. Yeah, the short tweet length is limiting, but most of my recent articles started out as tweets to other people or was inspired by ideas I encountered there.

My suggestion: Once you sign up on their web interface (and click 'Follow' on me :-), download a Twitter client. Twitter clients add things like hash searches and easy threading of comments. I am using Nambu on the Mac, I have no idea what a good Windows or Linux client would be, but anything's better than Twitter's lame web page.

-- Badtux the Twit Penguin

Computer Security Advice of the Month

This is from November 2002, from an official publication of the Federal Communications Commission:

TO ENUSRE THAT A CD CONTAINING PERSONAL INFORMATION CAN NEVER BE READ, PUT IT IN THE MICROWAVE. NUKE IT FOR ABOUT 10-15 SECONDS TO VAPORIZE THE METAL WHICH HOLDS THE DATA.

(Note: The mis-spelling of "ensure" is in the original). Forgotten in that advice is the requirement to have your fire extinguisher and respirator at ready, since the resulting fire will emit toxic fumes.

-- Badtux the Helpful Penguin

PS -- I think they were serious. I sure hope nobody tried following that advice!

A random thought

What's interesting about listening to Air Traffic Control is just how little talk is going on. There are a few very busy periods where there are a half dozen planes in the air all wanting to come in at around the same time, but the controller says something like "Delta 9532 go to flight level 4000 heading 1 6 0" and Delta 9532 says "Delta 9532 flight level 4000 heading 1 6 0" and that's that. 99% of the time, any of the four ATC channels serving the local airport are just dead air -- only the fact that I have my radio cycling through them lickity split in scanner mode finds anything at all.

Contrast with the movies where the pilots just jabber jabber jabber jabber when they're talking to the tower or the ATC or whatever. Reality. Just isn't as dramatic as the movies :-}.

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

Grr...

Red Hat Software is inundating me with change notices for Red Hat 5.2 Linux. Apparently they're coming out with Red Hat 5.3 Linux and releasing a major set of updates at the same time.

Problem is, a lot of these updates -- indeed, most of them -- aren't about anything that affects our servers. So now we gotta go through them one by one and see which ones are absolutely necessary to install because they patch security issues, and which ones we can skip installing. Grrrrr!

Linux sucks. Its only saving grace is that everything else sucks even more. (Talking about server operating systems here, obviously -- Mac OS is damned good on the desktop side of things).

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

A penguin's guide to Bay Area wildlife, Part II

Today we are going to talk about yet another form of Bay Area wildlife. This one is deceptively pleasant looking, and while harmless to most people, is absolutely deadly to its chosen prey. Consider it the Hello Kitty assault rifle of Bay Area wildlife.

That last should be seen as a Clue(tm). For the wildlife I am talking about is... the Chunky Japanese Manga Girl.

Identifying characteristics: Japanese features. Short straight black hair in a "pixie" cut with black spikes at the front and sides. Proportions of a pre-adolescent girl if blown up to twice the size (including twice the diameter of all limbs), but with large breasts. "Cute" boots that come to mid-calf to accentuate her large and solid calves. Mini-skirt that cuts off high to show off her large and solid thighs, perhaps as part of a jumper/"school girl" uniform combined with a white short-sleeve shirt. These aren't defining characteristics however, the Chunky Japanese Manga Girl has developed a wide range of colorations to lure in its prey, from "big socks" to mini-skirt'ed sailor suits. If all else fails, the Chunky Japanese Manga Girl is often accessorised with Hello Kitty or Sailor Moon accessories that can be used to identify this species.

Habitat: Manga and anime conventions, upscale downtown shopping areas near comics stores, attached to its prey in tourist areas of San Francisco or upscale shopping areas.

Danger to observer: Utterly harmless to most observers. Completely deadly to its chosen prey, the gaijan otaku -- the white American aficionado of Japanese anime and manga. Infatuation is swiftly followed by a long courtship which extracts all resources of the otaku while completely cutting off the otaku from his family and friends. The otaku is sucked in to the Chunky Japanese Manga Girl's orbit and can be observed clinging to her and catering to her every whim and buying her everything she ever wanted. At the end of this courtship the dried-up husk of the otaku, drained of all life and money, is discarded like an old banana peel, and a new otaku is located to repeat the process.

Mating habits: she mates only with white American otaku. If you have no idea what Hello Kitty or Sailor Moon are or the difference between manga and anime, she has no interest at all in you and will move to find new prey. Reproduction of this species is rumored but has never been observed in the wild, it is presumed that, prior to discarding her otaku, she allows sexual activity one and only one time and then if it results in pregnancy further extracts child support payments from the dried-up husk of her otaku to further the raising of a new Chunky Japanese Manga Girl offspring.

Suggestions for observer: If you have no interest in Japanese anime or manga, feel free to observe this species in complete safety. Do not approach too closely if she has her prey attached to her, however, for her otaku may misinterpret your approach as a clumsy pass and attack you. If you are a fan of Japanese anime or manga, on the other hand, exercise extreme caution and treat this species much the same way you'd treat a shark while swimming -- i.e., as something to get away from ASAP. The horror, oh the horror!

-- Badtux the Naturalist Penguin

Now that's a lotta pepperoni...

$2.6 million for pizza.com. An advertising consultant registered it in 1994 thinking to use it to land pizza company contracts, but never did. He paid $20 a year for the past decade mostly leaving it unused, until he got a bright idea -- what if I put it out to bid?

Too bad he wasn't prescient enough to buy beer.com at the same time. He coulda really made a killin'. Think about it. Beer and pizza. Goes together like, hmm, macaroni and cheese!

This penguin wishes that he owned any domains that might fetch similar dough. Alas, he does not. This penguin's domains tend towards the Orwellian. Sigh!

-- Badtux the Domain-poor Penguin

Six pack abs

Penguins are not exactly known for six pack abs. Not that you could tell under the feathers anyhow, but penguins tend to be... rotund.

That is why I was quite excited to discover someone who has a new way of getting six pack abs. And here is the result: Notice that this hairless monkey's pleasing rotundity did not stop him from achieving that much desired sexually attractive six pack abs, which I understand the female of the hairless monkey species really digs (at least, if I'm reading the Craigslist personals correctly). That gives this penguin some hope for the future. Well, if female penguins like six-pack abs, anyhow, but really, what female of any species can resist beer? Which obviously is the whole point of six-pack abs, right? Beer? And if I can find any female penguins around, given a general shortage of penguins in the northern hemisphere. Hmm...

-- Badtux the Rotund Penguin

Sleep deprivation experiment

DIdn't get to sleep until 6am, woke up at 10am. How does a penguin do on 4 hours of sleep? Interesting experiment, dear Watson. Didn't stop me from heading up to Wally World to get my medicines, then over to Harbor Freight Tools and Sears to start the work of replacing the tools that were in the toolbox that thieves stole (grrrrrr....). None of my core tools were in that toolbox (they were all with my Jeep that weekend), but lots of shit that just make working on cars and motorcycles more pleasant were in there, as well as some specialty tools that I don't even know whether I need'em anymore but it was nice having them in case I ever did need'em again (tools good! Ugh!). So over at Harbor Freight I got cheap replacements for the various specialty pliers (bent nose, needle nose, etc.) which when you need'em you need'em as well as various picks, scribes, tweezers, and other such implements of mass destruction, and oh yeah, my freakin' *air nozzles* were in that tool box too for attaching to my air compressor/air tank to do stuff like fill up tires and such via quick disconnect so I had to pick up a new air tool kit. Then over at Sears, I got replacements for the locking pliers and channel-loks that got stolen (I had the one of each that I use most often in the Jeep with me, well actually had two of the Vice-grips a tiny one and a regular size one, but the ones I didn't have do get occasional use when they're just the right tool for the job). Thus far the thief has set me back around $120, and I haven't even started on stuff like sheet metal shears and such that were in that toolbox, grrr...

So it appears that sleep deprivation makes me type run-on sentences and buy tools. Sigh. Guess it could be worse. Oh, yeah, what beats me is that I'm cutting back on my caffeine intake, just one cup in the morning for the past two days otherwise I can't safely navigate out of my front door and I'm going to cut that down to an 8oz cup rather than a 16oz mug (heh!) then to a 4oz cup at which point I should be able to kick the coffee habit entirely, but it doesn't seem to be helping the insomnia issue. And no, I don't use meth or crack, so don't bother telling me to quit them either :-). Oh yeah, my Macbook in clamshell mode hooked up to my widescreen 22" monitor is suhweet, but I can't find a picture browser that is as nice as gqview on Linux for the Mac. iPhoto is almost there, but is way too slow once you import thousands of photos into it and sucks up all the memory on the system (and remember I have two gigabytes of memory in my Macbook), not to mention that you have to import the photos into it in the first place, you can't just browse an arbitrary directory full of penguin porn for example unless you import it and who wants to have a 'penguin porn' category in their iPhoto left tab heh! So I guess I gotta fire up Xcode and do my first Aqua programming -- porting gqview to the native MacOS API. That oughtta be a trip :-).

Oh, for those of you who have multiple cats with multiple food bowls, do you find that your cats are picky about what order you fill the food bowls in? If I fi ll the food bowl by the wine rack before I fill the food bowl by the refrigerator, the furry beasties get all discombobulated. The Mighty Fang goes and starts eating out of the food bowl by the wine rack until Mencken shoves him away to grab a few bites, meantime I put food into the food bowl by the refrigerator and nobody's eating out of there. But if I put food into the food bowl by the refrigerator, TMF starts chowing down, while Mencken goes and waits by the one by the wine rack, I put food in there, and Mencken starts chowing down, then it's both kitties chowing down at the same time like it's supposed to be. Damned furry beasts simply do not tolerate any variation from their routine, it gets them all tangled up... hmm, okay, so sleep deprivation starts making penguins start talking about cats, photos, crack habits, and other stuff in a posting about insominia too. Babble babble babble...

-- Badtux the Sleepless Penguin

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Compiz Eye Candy

Tasty eye candy. A 3D desktop. Just what every geek wants when he's got CPU power to burn and a 3D video card more powerful than one of those old Cray supercomputers.

To install, I typed:

sudo apt-get desktop-effects

then went into the System->Preferences->Desktop Effects menu and turned it on. And that was it!

-- Badtux the Geek Penguin