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Friday, November 20, 2009

New MacBook Pro

I'm glad I chose to spend the extra $50 to get an "anti-glare" LCD on this laptop. I will never understand the "glossy" screen bullshit most laptops come with these days. Maybe the marketroids discovered that people liked looking at their reflections all day.

"Yes please, I'll have the glare screen!"

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Prisoner 2009

So far what I like most about the remake of The Prisoner is, "wraps." All food served in The Village comes in the form of sandwich wraps. Wrap sandwiches? The one exception seems to be cherry cake.

I always hated wraps. Only people who don't know what good bread is could like wraps. In The Prisoner and in real life wraps represent bland, corporate catered lunches. A McDonalds hamburger bun has more character than a wrap. Wraps utterly fail to be bread. Pita bread is what you should use if you want a rolled up sandwich.

When wraps come into contact with something moist they get slimy and since most sandwich fillers are moist, wrap sandwiches are almost always slimy.

I'm not a big fan of burritos either. Burritos are fake Mexican, IMHO. Wraps are similar to white flour tortillas, which of course are not real tortillas. Real tortillas are made with corn.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

rantmore re Windows

My employer was not willing to give me a Mac so for the next week I had to use a Dell E6400 running WinXP 64bit. He wanted me to run VMware on XP so I could run Linux virtual machines on the lappie. Great. That's like seatbelting yourself to the hood of a car and reaching in through a window to steer.

So wow. Big surprise; the experience has been pure hell.
The box spontanious resets itself at least daily. Yay! And yeah, I have all the latest recommended patches installed from the Beast of Redmond.

OS X and Linux distros have plenty of "features" that annoy me but they don't crash with anything like the frequency of XP. And I never know how J. Random Windows app will behave. There's no consistancy. Today WinSCP pissed me off severely. What does it do with a file you double click on? I assumed I was downloading the file to -somewhere- but POOF a blank window pops up and the file is nowhere to be found. WTF? Shouldn't the default action be "SAVE TO LOCAL DISK"??? I'd look in /tmp if windoze had one.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Verizon h8

Man, I fuckin hate VZN. At least three times this week I am alerted to new voice mail but the phone has not rung in hours! Apparently the call never made it to the handset because there is no "missed call" in the display.

This made me want to test my phone to see if it was working.
So I called my cell from a landline and immediately "BING BING BING" goes my cell phone. Is this because the landline was VZN? Do they send calls from other providers straight to voicemail when their oversubscribed network is saturated?

I'm guessing, "yes."


Oh, and when VZN does send me voice mail alerts for new voice mail, the alerts arrive TWENTY MINUTES after the inbound call was placed!

VZN, you are teh suck. If I was not getting this phone for next to nothing, I'd jump to some other provider. I may do so anyway.

If Obama straightened out the FCC that would make up for all the mistakes he's made to date.

I'd like to roast Michael Powell on a spit. Kevin J. Martin too.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Stargate Universe is teh suck

Man, such a blatant, pathetic attempt to ape the style and substance of Battlestar Galactica. What a odoriferous pile of steaming dung.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Snow Leopard is good

I paid the $25 for Sniz Leopard and installed it last night. I bought it only for the much hyped Exchange integration features.

Seems to work fine so far. I now have access to the Exchange server's address book, which is the only part of Exchange that seems useful. The appointment alerts work in iCal, too.

Some day before I die I hope Exchange will cease to be thought of as indispensable. That will be a good day. There are plenty of alternatives but in 2009 it is unthinkable for most companies to ditch Exchange for anything else. The reasons for keeping or deploying Exchange are primarily based on FUD.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Horseneck and East Beach

Nice weekend for the beach. The temp of the water at Horseneck was perfect but the waves were no good for body surfing. A crab pinched my toe hard enough to make it bleed; no foolin. There were crab carcasses and claws all over the shingle.

I got curious about the jetty and point to the east of the beach. When I drove out of the Horseneck parking lot I turned right and ended up on East Beach Rd which allowed me to drive out onto what turned out to be Gooseberry Island (or Point depending on who you ask). There is a massive stone jetty leading out to the island. There is room for about 30 cars to park and a boat launching ramp. The island has two dilapidated concrete observation towers roughly in the middle. Don't bother looking in them. They are trashed. Looks like a crack den inside. I can't help wondering why they were built. Was it to spot Nazi uboats?

There are tall reeds growing over most of the island and the mosquitoes breeding in these marshes are ferocious. It's better to walk around the island than down the paths bisecting it. The bugs attract lots of swallows who dazzle the viewer with their acrobatic flight. In turn, the swallows attracted a small raptor who's species I could not identify.

The water on the eastern side of the island/jetty is calm, clear and shallow for 200 yards or more. The island blocks the wind effectively despite being pretty flat. There are big stands of eelgrass growing in this lagoon-like body of water. (Is there a word for lagoon-like?) Plenty of crabs in the water here too. Saw shoals of fish; five or six inch fellers. There were some tiny, brown, centipede-like creatures swimming in the shallowest water. They seemed to be hunting something even smaller.

There was a huge amount of garbage on the island. Half of it looked like it had washed up out of the sea. We ought to put some unemployed burger flippers to work cleaning it up. That means you, Enrico de Nuevo Bedford. You aren't going to catch anything fishing from the jetty anyway, dumbass.

The neat thing about East Beach is that there is no fee to park there and there's plenty of parking if you get there in the AM or in the evening. If there's no space on the island, you can park on East Beach Rd. Pretty cool place to swim if you are tired of being bounced around by the waves and want to practice the breast stroke.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

wearing flipflops at work?

Really? You can't wear Birkenstocks or something? Flipflops are for wearing around the pool and beach, my friends. I sure hope you aren't driving home wearing those!

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Turbo Experience


This is too lul to ignore. Does Bruno consult with Operasoft's designers?

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

WBCN is now sports radio. HAW-HAW!

I had a job once where one of my bosses insisted in having WBCN playing throughout the entire workday. Talk about "tight rotation"! BCN played the same 20 songs all week, every week. Like the fucking Cranberries were The Second Coming! Nevermind BCN never played my kind of music; they were about 40% music at best. The rest was jocks talking bullshit and commercials for deoderant.
They had this character named, "Carlos the Computer." I guess it was supposed to be some kind of early AI. It was probably just a jock talking into a MIDI or something. Fuck you, sports guitar shitheads!
HAW-HAW! You tortured us long enough!

Monday, July 6, 2009

Full Metal Jacket and Two Lovers

Busy weekend for movie watching and canoeing.

Full Metal Jacket was disappointing. I was expected Vietnam during wartime to be sweatier and messier than it looked in this film. Everything looked so staged. Shouldn't war look more chaotic? Where was the jungle? There were almost no trees in this movie!

Take the scene where the whore approaches the two Marine journalists, the infamous "me so horny" scene. Where is everyone? Asian cities are crammed with people most of the time. So if it's supposed to be 5:00 AM, say so. Explain why it looks like a ghost town.
Were the Thai extras so expensive? The whole movie is like that. There is no crowding, ever.

There have been so many Vietnam War movies. I have seen most of them and this was one of the least interesting. I though Kubric was infallible but this film is quite mediocre. The best scenes in the movie take place in boot camp.

Defiance was almost as disappointing as FMJ. How fucking dumb is it to make actors use those phony accents? Either have then speak Russian, Yiddish or English without some bogus, clumsy accent please. They sound like morons! No more of this "vat did ju say?" bullshit. Perhaps a European production would have been better because they tend to avoid such nonsense. Maybe this was a remake for American audiences. The movie was pretty OK otherwise. It's a great story.

Two Lovers was really good. Joaquin Phoenix was exceptional. He was so deep into his character. I hope he is not really giving up acting. That would be a shame.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Microsoft FAIL

http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

http://tinyurl.com/kwohgy

We have only this exerpt,

"I can only wonder how many other Windows enterprise software failures are kept hidden away within IT departments by companies unwilling to reveal just how foolish their decisions to rely on archaic, cranky Windows software solutions have proven to be."

BRILLIANT!

Saturday, June 27, 2009

more cell phone HATE

There is no way to sync my ancient Blackberry 8703e to my MacBook Pro. There is no app except a $6 per month web service, and who knows what shit-ass security they have.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Oracle buying Sun

Yeah it's old news, I know.

I can't help thinking that this buy-out by Oracle is just another example of why using a FOSS OS is the only way to go. We can expect Oracle to make Sun's technical support go from bad to abysmal now. We should start planning now for the imminent demise of Solaris. Why did Oracle buy Sun? Perhaps so they can turn Solaris into an purely Oracle-optimized OS? Nah. For Sun's customers. I predict they will soon kill off the Sparc processor and then Solaris. OpenSolaris may survive as a hobby OS.

MacBook Pro issue

Last night I left my MacBook Pro running on battery power and went to bed. This morning I could not boot the thing. I kept hitting the power button and nothing happened. After having been plugged into its power supply for several minutes, it finally booted. I guess there is no way for this thing to use AC power directly. The battery needs some charge before it can start. This is not true of my old R40 Thinkpad or my G4 iBook.

That was scary. I was sure I had a dead Mac.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Star Trek movie

5 of 10 dongs. This movie was made for kids eight through 14 years old. I prefer scifi for adults, like BSG and Firefly. Another disappointing Trek movie.

The actor playing Kirk was not a good choice. There needs to be a flash of devlish genius (or at least intelligence) in Kirk's eyes and with this actor there was nothing but blankness. He has a squeaky voice too. Compare it to Shatner's voice. He did not embody Kirk just as some actors who have played Bond fail to become Bond.

Overall the story was weak, with little character development. The time travel theme has been done to death and the writers didn't add any new wrinkle.

I like the idea that the crew was struggling to master new technologies and dreaming up new uses of these technologies. There is a trial and error aspect to technology that many people (in real life) are not willing to accept. They feel entitled to results but are unwilling to learn how to use the tools required to gain those results . . . unless it's a cell phone.

I'm less sympathetic to the he "cheating = hacking" theme. I'm sure this attempt to blur the difference between hacking and cheating will be a huge hit with the 8-14 audience but that doesn't make it right. Sure the Kobayashi Maru test is impossible to defeat but cracking the test's server did not prove anything except to demonstrate Kirk's cracking skills. The object of the test is to reveal the subject's character; to show what he might do in a seemingly hopeless situation. Not every test has a right or wrong answer and cheating is not the answer.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Pulseaudio is for fappists

Why the FUCK is there another audio subsystem in Fedora now? Fuck you, you fucking fucks. ALSA is fine. Leave it the fuck alone. I need TWO audio softwares on my box? Again I say, fuck you you fucking fucks and the fuckdog you rode in on.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Best Dilbert Evar

Dilbert.com

paramiko to sftp without keys

Stupid server does not allow installation of ssh keys. This makes file transfers harder to automate from a cron job for example because scp and ssh have no --username --passwd options.

Python can help! I can sftp a whole dir of files to the sftp server with this script. My next task is to make paramiko accept filename extention wildcards. i.e. 'sftp *.csv mucknuck@sftp.computrid.com:'

import paramiko
import os

hostname = 'sftp.computrid.com'
port = 22
username = 'nucknuck'
password = '05N9289!'
dir_path = 'moo'
local_path = '/home/datasvcs/AIG/moo'

if __name__ == "__main__":
t = paramiko.Transport((hostname, port))
t.connect(username=username, password=password)
sftp = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(t)
files = os.listdir(local_path)
for f in files:
print 'Uploading', f
sftp.put(os.path.join(dir_path, f), f)
t.close()

Sunday, March 15, 2009

reset OS X Leopard user's video mode

This hackintosh of mine is a trip. When logged in as an ordinary user I ask Leopard to use a video mode not of its choosing. The screen turns blue and fails to revert back to the previous setting. Perhaps if I had an Apple LCD display it would behave differently but I doubt it. I rebooted the machine from an ssh login and tried to login as the same user who had the blue screen. Guess what? I login and the screen turns blue and stays that way.

Anyway to expunge the broken setting all you need do is ssh into the stricken user's account and:

cd /Users/msh/Library/Preferences/ByHost

rm com.apple.preference.displays.*
rm com.apple.windowserver.*

Lemme know if this works for you.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Body of Lies

Blah. Dumb movie. I couldn't sympathize with any of the characters. The one bright spot is Golshifteh Farahani as Aisha. She could melt an iceberg with those eyes. Then again, the idea that she would date DiCaprio's dodgy character is pretty far fetched. DiCaprio will only tell her is that he's a "political advisor to the King." nplz. Aisha would be deeply suspicious, and rightly so. Also, women as pretty as Farahani (especially in a traditional society) always have men chasing them so where are her would-be suitors? If DiCaprio had a run-in with some Arab guy over her my willingness to suspend disbelief might have lasted a bit longer.

Oh yeah, the fake Middle Eastern soundtrack is nauseating.

Note to Hollywood. Stop making movies about Arab terrorists. You suck at this.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

The Spartan

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360009/

This movie is the shit. It has a great cast, superb dialog and it's full of twists you can't anticipate. I like movies that don't varnish their characters too much. These characters, especially Kilmer's, are deeply focused on their missions. You rarely get to see them as their private selves. As with other Mamet joints, the characters declare their intentions in blunt, Hemingwayesque fashion. Nobody mumbles; nobody minces words. Any one of them has more nerve than the rest of us combined.

I'll give it 9 of 10 dongs.