Maybe if this shirt is witty enough...

adobe fail

cowbert@gmail.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:26:52 GMT

PSA for the night:

Adobe InDesign+InCopy+Samba+MacOS X (with users who demand group-based ACLs so everyone can write to everyone else's files) == fucked up.

GOOOO RUNNN GET TO TEH CHOPPAH

cowbert@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:48:51 GMT

Crysis > Crysis Warhead > Far Cry 2

Review:

I never really got into Far Cry 2, but I beat Crysis, without cheating (horray), in about 4-5 days. Very awesome graphics, well-connected levels, no silly experience-ruining gotchas (like timer, puzzle, or whatever silliness).

Also, FC2's controls leave much to be lacking. I understand it's supposed to be way more RPGish, but the ability to just instill random carnage was what I was looking for. Also, wtf with no LEAN? EVERY FPS NOW HAS LEAN...

The whole nanosuit thing with Crysis is an interesting addition to the typical FPS genre. Also being able to mod weapons with the pickups was a nice touch too. Like sniper scopes on akimbo machine pistols? TOTALLY. Main gripes: no combobinds for keys (like ctrl-F, or something funky). Side gripe: the grenade launcher didn't have a separate sight, which you really needed...for maximum kill :) If they put a boss in the ship-interior level that would have been pretty cool too (imo), but I'm not missin it...

The main reason why the expansion pack isn't as good as the original:
1. What's up with the auto-ammo pickup thing?! There was a very specific way I wanted to allocate ammo loads and I have to play Delta difficulty now to avoid that?

2. The maps are way more disjointed than the original. Like on the second map you don't even need to kill everyone, it just ends when you hit the objective and the AI takes over and you move on...

== SPOILER WARNING ==

The only issue with Crysis was the end. The game was pretty epic in length, but at the end I was like oh yeah just beat 2 bosses in a row, and then the cut scene is like "we're going back to the island" and I'm all like OH YEAH...then it goes to credits, and I'm like noooooooo we have to save Prophet!!!

frak me

cowbert@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:16:38 GMT

I just got sucked into becoming a Moodle dev (at least for now...)

nerdrage

cowbert@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:18:48 GMT

argh I just got bit by the libjpeg 6 -> 7 abi bump. Even symlinking /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.so.10 to libjpeg.so.9 doesn't fix this problem:

"JPEG library version mismatch, caller expected version 62, received 70"

WTF GIMP?! WHY DOES YOUR STUPID JPEG PLUGIN CHECK THE JPEG LIB VERSION!? Now I have to rebuild gegl and crap because of your stupid code...

Zicam

cowbert@gmail.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:16:11 GMT

Long time no post, mostly due to excessive busyness (or maybe just too much gaming). Also I am pissed at BF2 right now so I am in a ranting mood. (also I spend most of my social networking on facebook these days).

So apparently Zicam's active ingredient is Zincum Gluconicum. I was googling this today, with various people bloviating about whether or not it really does anything or is harmful etc. (Since the makers are being accused of Zicam causing anosmia). Not sure why people are skeptical about this. We already know zinc is an immunomodulator since it affects metallothionein and alters: antibody expression profiles as well as Th1 and Th2 populations. MT modulation appears to shift host defenses away from bacterial while possibly enhancing antiviral responses (most likely due to the ab isotype change and downregulation of various stuff: read the MT papers by Lynes, et al).

So what's the problem, people? (Sure immunomodulation can result in funkiness, but DON'T say Zicam doesn't do anything...). As to whether it causes anosmia, I dunno (and what mechanism would that involve? something with the signalling pathway or downregulation of ORs, or just outright killing olfactory neurons in the nasal epithelia?). Heavy metals are peculiar species...

STO: trying to be everything?

cowbert@gmail.com — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:19:20 GMT

Based on the interviews I've seen, Star Trek Online is going to be like: Star Trek Bridge Commander (shipboard stuff) + Starfleet Command (SFC-style tactics and crew selection/bonuses) + Eve Online (skill training + exploration) + WoW (instanced battlespaces and WoW-style Factional Warfare) + Fallout3 (Over-the-shoulder shooter)?

Screenshots look pretty nice, although because it's Cryptic-style, there is a bit too much comic-like style going on - still prefer EVE-style artwork...

Bad Battleclinic.com web security practices

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:55:36 GMT

1. On the login page, when entering an unregistered username, the web app returns with "No such username". This is a particularly insidious form of information leakage because it allows you to mine for valid usernames for password guessing.

2. The registration verification email contains your password, which means it's not being one-way hashed in any way.

Why do legit mailers abuse their hostnames?

cowbert@gmail.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:45:00 GMT

It makes me unable to use reject_unknown_sender in any meaningful way. Mail coming out of your relay should be using MAIL FROM that has an A or MX record!

Deploying Trac with pkgsrc on RHEL

cowbert@gmail.com — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:48:05 GMT

0. yum install gcc. to be safe, I would install ncurses-devel too.
1. Bootstrap pkgsrc.
2. Add gcc-c++ if not already done so (required for some ports written in c++ in pkgsrc).

www/trac dependency tree:

textproc/expat
         |
         +--------------------+
                              |
devel/apr                     |
      |                       |
      +--> devel/apr-util     |
                 |            |
                 +------------+---> www/neon
                              |         | 
                              |         +--> devel/subversion-base
                              |                    |                                                      
lang/python25                 |                    | 
     |                        |                    |                                
     +-->------------------------------------------+------------------> devel/py25-subversion
     |                        |                    |                          |
     |                        |                    +------------------+       |
     |                        |                                       |       |
     +-->---------------------+------> textproc/py25-expat            |       |
     |                                          |                     |       |
     +--> devel/py25-setuptools                 |                     |       |
     |           |                              |                     |       |
     |           +---------------------+        |                     |       |
     |                                 |        |                     |       |
     +--> time/py-pytz                 |        |                     |       |
     |         |                       |        |                     |       |
     |         +--> devel/py-babel     |        |                     |       |
     |                    |            |        |                     |       |
     |                    |            |        |                     |       |
     +-->-----------------+-->---------+--------+---> www/genshi      |       |
     |                                 |                  |           |       |
     +-->------------+                 |                  |           |       |
                     |                 |                  |           |       |
                     |                 |                  |           |       |
                     |                 |                  |           |       |
databases/sqlite3    |                 +------------+     |           |       |
          |          |                              |     |           |       |
          +-->-------+--> databases/py25-sqlite3    |     |           |       |
                     |              |               |     |           |       |
                     |              |               |     |           |       |
                     +-->-----------+-->------------+-->--+-->--------|-------+--> www/trac
                                                                      |  
www/apache22                                                          |
    |                                                                 |
    +-->--------------------------------------------------------------+--> www/ap22-subversion
    |
    +--> www/ap22-fastcgi
    
databases/openldap-client

"The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us"

cowbert@gmail.com — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:26:11 GMT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012101671.html

In the bottom of the article the OP writes:

Perhaps a better solution for live streaming is a peer-to-peer model where streaming quality improves as more people watch. (Check out RayV, which does this).

Uh, has anybody ever heard of bittorrent over there? Both Mininova and EZTV already purport to do torrent-streaming...Using BT for live broadcasts like these would more legitimize the protocol against belligerent ISPs and other net-neutrality opponents.

On the eve of a new administration, take note: The free market is a lie

cowbert@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:22:29 GMT

The true free market probably hasn't existed since the middle of the industrial revolution.

I like these following posts:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corporations-versus-the-market-or-whip-conflation-now/

and to some extent

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/01/fundamental-problem-with-libertarianism.html (which links to above)

which was gotten to by:

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-01-08.html

John Kenneth Galbraith (a self-admitted social democrat), further posited that because there is no real free market, and government cannot hope to deconstruct corporatism, then its only anti-corporate power is through blanket intervention via de-deregulation. (Also, certain sectors cannot necessarily be sustainable without price fixing or subsidies, notably at this point the critical one is probably agriculture (of which he was an astute student)).

Bluemars is dead again

cowbert@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:10:25 GMT

Stream seems to be down. :(

Soma Space is ok, but still haven't found the perfect electro ambient spacey channel yet :(

Ahh IRC, how I love thee <3

cowbert@gmail.com — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:10:35 GMT

10:36 -!- Topic for #distributed: Welcome to multiplayer Notepad
10:36 -!- Topic set by Nugget [] [Wed Jan  7 23:32:52 2009]

If you think about, it totally makes sense. IRC is the MMO text editor :)

Computer: End Program

cowbert@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:04:50 GMT

RIP Majel Barrett-Roddenberry

Firefox vs. IE vulns (and more RHEL WTFs)

cowbert@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:49:12 GMT

Ok so the IE vuln is basically rooted in oledb32.dll. Everybody thought this was silly.

However:

The way that RedHat fixes the recent firefox vulns apparently requires not just the Firefox package to be rebuilt but requires changes in nss and nspr as well! AND ON TOP OF THAT, apparently the nss and nspr packages are dependencies for openssh on RHEL 5, so it's not like I can just uninstall that crap... WTFWTF

yay mmorpg dramas!

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 08:36:40 GMT

So apparently there was a mineral duping exploit revealed by CCP, and now everyone is comparing it to the previous "t20" scandal or thinks that a troll on another forum by a banned player is gospel. Just because Iran Contra happened doesn't mean 9/11 is all conspiratorial, people, geeze.

armchair etymology

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 05:10:18 GMT

Potamos (Gr. River)-> Potable water

My love life totally resembles this comic

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 05:00:40 GMT

coding music, revisited, again

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 04:38:07 GMT

So, I am totally in love with this track: Waltz into the Moonlight, by Tryad (Try^d). I first discovered it when watching one of Mike Wesch's youtube videos. I noted in an earlier post that finding similar sounding tracks Jamendo was proving to be difficult.

This piece reminds me of the soundtrack to Gattaca, but much more mellowed out (I dug out my copy a few minutes ago, and it's just not the same) by replacing the main strings with the piano and substantially breakbeating the rhythm... It's like the difference between Salt'n'Peppas "Push It" and Timbaland's "The Way I Are". In any case, this is a really great piece of music to code by, when I don't feel like listening to trance, and I wish I could find other tracks like it. (The rest of the Tryad album isn't as great, mostly because it has some funky vocal tracks and a funky industrial one).

I also tried out some of the other music Mike Wesch has used for his videos, such as There's Nothing Impossible by Deus, but this one certainly takes the cake...

official maintainer status!

cowbert@gmail.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:14:50 GMT

I'm now listed as the maintainer for databases/freetds. Now onward to databases/unixODBC!

web 2.0 tagging gripe?

cowbert@gmail.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:56:16 GMT

I noticed on Jamendo that there's no "real(tm)" way to search for multiple tags at once. Since tagging is sort of a poor man's ontology-builder, you'd figure that searching for a set of tags would narrow down results to point to content that had all of these tags defined for it.

Specific use-case:

I like Tryad. Tryad has the following tags on Jamendo: electro ambient pop triphop chillout piano classical melodic atmospheric ethereal. So theoretically, if I can search for all of these tags at once, I should get (theoretically) everything that sounds like Tryad.

So why can't tags work like the boolean ad hoc searches used to?

(Interestingly, one site I know of which supports such tag-chaining is cheggit.net (NSFW)).

Thomson Reuter sues GMU over Zotero-Endnote interoperability

cowbert@gmail.com — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:53:30 GMT

Stifling innovation, one citation at a time:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7214/full/455708a.html

sysinstall fixup

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:52:15 GMT

Mostly for uniheliodem if he's interested:

Too late for 7.1 probably, but someone ought to patch sysinstall so that it writes a gjournal label after partitioning, prior to disklabel, and then set the default newfs to use -J. Or provide an interface to do that (like a gjournal step after partioning, before disklabel under the custom installation method). The appropriate module is (now) part of GENERIC so there is really no reason to no longer not use it (like the triple negative there!?!) (then again, I am whining because I just provisioned this box and forgot about it...).

This is what happens when biologists learn to knit:

cowbert@gmail.com — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:46:15 GMT

Mr. Knitted Lab Mouse and Mr. Knitted Frog

JDK and CUPS?!

cowbert@gmail.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:18:22 GMT

Why does JDK 1.6 require the CUPS headers to build!?

I've used BSD LPD for the past 5 years and I'm perfectly happy with it. More software I could do without :(