By
anders pearson
21 Apr 2003
this
identity theft is becoming a very serious problem. there isn’t much you can do to prevent someone from getting your social security number and messing with your finances, but signing your email will at least help protect your reputation.
lately, i’ve even been toying with the idea of <a href=”http://www.sixapart.com/log/2002/12/verifying_pgp_s.shtml”>adding support for PGP signatures</a> to thraxil. i just haven’t quite worked out how to make it not break with some of thraxil’s auto-formatting and HTML-sanitizing magic.
By
anders pearson
20 Apr 2003
yesterday was <a href=”http://so_i_was_thinking.blogspot.com/“>blair</a>’s birthday, so daphne arranged a nice surprise party for him. all the cool kids came. <a href=”http://www.superultramega.com/“>jP</a>, his girl, <a href=”http://bootypile.blogspot.com/“>mark</a>, his girl, lani and i, and a few dozen other assorted Batesies from near and far and random williamsburg hipsters.
keith made cold drink (one part cold. one part drink. tastes like kool-aid. has enough alcohol to power a car with.) lani baked a couple cakes. there was music, and balloons that i overinflated and would pop loudly at random intervals. blair was surprised, and happy.
the surprise for the rest of us came at about 1 AM when debbie started pushing us all off the living room rug to clear a space. a couple unfamiliar 20-somethings who i’d just assumed were part of the williamsburg set came out and said something about driving all the way down from Montreal and that they hadn’t really planned on doing a show and were a little drunk so we shouldn’t expect too much. then they started doing acrobatics right there in blair’s living room. balancing acts (pretty well executed considering the amount of cold drink they’d been given), contortionist stuff, and strength poses. they did a little impromptu performance that lasted 10 minutes, then said their goodbyes and hit the road, leaving most of us wondering what the fuck had just happened.
turns out that through some kind of friend-of-a-friend, thing, some of the members of <a href=”http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/cirquedusoleil/default.htm”>Cirque Du Soleil</a> had been invited to, and came to the party.
beats the hell out of a clown.
By
anders pearson
20 Apr 2003
i’m posting this about a month late because things got really busy with lani moving in and all. but, better late than never, right?
i guess the stars lined up just right last month because i managed to be in the right places at the right time to see the United Tour in two different cities. i had already planned on going down to DC to help lani pack up her stuff when i realized that if i left just a little earlier than i'd planned, i could catch the show in nyc before i left and then again in DC.
so now, you, the lucky reader get two concert reviews for the price of one.
the bill for the tour included pigface, my life with the thrill kill kult, zeromancer, and bile. the DC show also included a local hardcore band whose name excapes me.
in NYC, the venue was (again) BB King’s lounge. first napalm, now pigface, and they have some upcoming shows with the likes of covenant and meshuggah. it looks like it’s becoming the place to go for heavy music in new york. weird.
in DC, they played at Nation, which looks like a pretty cool club from what i saw.
the local hardcore band who opened in DC weren’t too bad. they sounded pretty good but the singer seemed to be trying too hard to look cool and scary and ended up looking kind of dorky.
bile, if you’re into their style was excellent. they push the limits of how much static and distortion you can mix into a song and still have any parts of it distinguishable. nevertheless, they were tasty live. their sound, their look, and their stage show all complement each other nicely.
zeromancer is a new band from norway. they tend more to the pop end of the industrial spectrum. they weren’t bad, but they seemed to be more glitz than substance over all.
the only real disappointment of the lineup for me was Thrill Kill. i've been listening to them forever and never had the chance to see them live. other friends of mine who had seen them had said that they were fantastic. christ, the club scene where they played in The Crow has been my mental image of the perfect industrial concert. unfortunately, they seem to have lost a few members and Groovie Mann (the vocalist) seemed really tired and run down. there was no guitar and no bass (even though their old bassist, Charles Levi, was playing with pigface on the tour), just vocals, drums, and keyboards. that severely limited what songs they could play.
pigface, though. damn. pigface puts on a good show. this tour’s incarnation was: Martin Atkins, Curse Mackey (Grim Faeries, Evil Mothers), Charles Levi (Thrill Kill Kult), Seibold (Hate Dept), Krztoff (Bile), Chris Connelly (Revolting Cocks, Ministry), Michelle Walters (VooDou), Lacey Conner (Nocturne), Kami (Apocalypse Theatre), and Blake (Grim Faeries).
their set in new york was easily the better of the two. the sound there was perfect. in DC, for some reason, the sound was turned up so loud for pigface that everything was distorted and you couldn’t really make out any of the vocals.
for the new york show, En Esch from KMFDM showed up and did Du Liebst Mich nicht, Ich Lieb' Dich Nicht. in DC, there were no special guests, but they did play a cover of RevCo's Stainless Steel Providers to make up for it. otherwise, pigface's set consisted pretty much entirely of tracks from the new album with the obligatory Suck as the encore.
one of my favorite previous members of pigface is Meg Lee Chin. i was disappointed to find out that she wasn't on this tour. i was even more disappointed to find out that the reason why involves Martin being an asshole to her.
By
Eric Mattes
18 Apr 2003
There’s a whole world of RPS out there that I never knew about! Although it’s a pretty trivial game for most people, computer scientists (being who they are) have been exploring the strategy behind this seemingly random game. However, you’ve got to admit that when you play, you do have a strategy of some sort. It is this fact that the computer RPS opponents will attempt to exploit. Check out this page for the current champion:
http://ofb.net/~egnor/iocaine.html
also check this one out for some real-time action that you can play on the web:
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~emin/writings/lz_rps/
-E
By
anders pearson
15 Apr 2003
i am an information junkie. every day i read a lot of websites. there are dozens of news sites, weblogs, and comics that i read on a regular basis. i also like fresh information; i like to know about something as soon as possible. i also have a job that i’d like to keep and every once in a while i’d like to at least pretend that i have a life. so i don’t really have time to visit each of these sites one (or more) times a day checking to see if they’ve been updated with any new content.
luckily, there's this great standard called RSS which has really taken off lately, and has made my life much easier. RSS is simply a way of making your content available in a standardized machine-readable format. it becomes useful when you use software that can aggregate multiple RSS sources in a single location.
there are dozens of RSS aggregators out there. just do a google search and see for yourself. most of them, such as NetNewsWire run as a regular desktop application. that model's no good for me since i do some of my surfing from home and some from work. so if i've read an item while at work, it would still show up as new on a desktop aggregator at home. the kind that i really wanted was server-side with a central database and a browser based interface. there are plenty of those out there too, but none of the ones i looked at felt quite right to me; either they were too slow, they didn't have features i wanted, their interface didn't mesh with how i surf, or they had way too many features that i didn't need and that only get in the way.
so, because i'm a perfectionist, control-freak, and i know Perl, i spent a couple hours writing my own. at the time i was also looking for any excuse to try my hand at writing an application as a full-fledged mod_perl handler rather than a collection of CGI or Apache::Registry scripts.
the simple web-based aggregator i wrote, i call Corral. you just tell it to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds, and it fetches them hourly, picks out any new items from the feeds and presents them to you in an easy to read format. when you've read the items, you mark them as read and they won't show up again. once it's set up, it's very simple to use.
i’ve been using it myself for the last month or so and now i don’t know how i functioned without it. anyway, i figured the least i could do would be to give other people access to it so they can experience the wonders of RSS first-hand as well.
so, if you want to beta-test Corral, just do the following: go create a new account, then login to that account. at that point you shouldn't be subscribed to any feeds so you won't see much. follow the link for 'subscribe to existing feeds'. it will take you to a list of a bunch of feeds that i (or my alpha testers) have already added to the system. select (with control-click) the ones that you want to subscribe to and hit the 'subscribe to selected feeds' button. you will probably now see a bunch of items listed on your main page. once you've read them, just hit the 'mark all items as read' button at the bottom (or select individual items and mark just those ones as read). this main page functions as sort of an INBOX like you are probably used to for your email. once you've marked items as read, they won't show up in your INBOX anymore. adding a new RSS feed is a two step process, first add it via the 'add new feed' link, then make sure to subscribe to it. Corral also has the notion of categories for feeds. if you find them useful and can figure them out on your own, go ahead and use them, otherwise, just ignore them.
Corral runs on my workstation at work. it should be pretty fast but be warned that since it isn’t a production server, it could occasionally be offline or just really slow (like if i’m compiling any big projects or playing UT or something).
once you start to learn to enjoy Corral or any other RSS aggregator, you will soon find yourself frustrated that some site you like to read doesn't provide an RSS feed (and hence, can't be aggregated). first of all, make sure it doesn't have an RSS feed; sometimes they're just hidden. if it's a weblog hosted on livejournal, it has a feed. all you have to do is append '/rss' to the end of the url. eg, lani's journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo would have its RSS feed at http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo/rss. if it isn't a livejournal site, there's still hope. look at the source for the web-page, look in the <head> for a tag like <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.miromi.org/mt/blog/index.rdf" />. if it has one of those, you're in business.
if you still don't have any luck, you have about three options left: 1) harass the owner of the site and get them to add an RSS feed (in many weblog authoring tools or CMSs, this is a simple addition), 2) learn Perl or python and write your own script to scrape the site and generate your own feed (if you do this in Perl, i highly recommend that you look into the XML::RSS, HTML::TokeParser, and LWP::Simple modules).
a third option, is to use another little tool that i setup. fenris just watches a given url, and creates a very simple RSS feed that has a new item any time the site changes at all. it's very stupid and can easily be fooled by things like ad banners which occasionally make the page appear to be changed even when the content is really the same. but, it's very fast and doesn't require any programming. using fenris should be pretty much self-explanatory by now.
so if you have too much time on your hands (or potentially too little) and have managed to make it this far, past all those paragraphs of technical talk, feel free to give Corral a spin. if you find it useful, or have any ideas for how it could be improved, let me know. source code is forthcoming once i get around to packaging it up.
By
anders pearson
11 Apr 2003
the other night i stumbled across Gåte and i'm blown away.
they’re a norwegian band. they play mostly traditional norwegian folk songs but with modern interpretations. their singer has an unbelievably powerful voice and she’s apparently only 16. the band’s sound ranges from alternative rock to metal to ambient/goth/electronic. but always with a tradiotional folk slant to the melodies and folk instruments mixed in with the electric guitars and drum machines.
very eclectic stuff but worth checking out.
By
anders pearson
11 Apr 2003
thraxil now pings <a href=”http://www.weblogs.com/“>weblogs.com</a> when new posts are made. just in case you’re into that kind of thing.
By
anders pearson
10 Apr 2003
lani and i managed to score a couple tickets to <a href=”http://www.bjork.com/“>björk</a>’s brooklyn concert in august. her website has the password. if you act fast, they may still have some.
By
Mark Boudreau
10 Apr 2003
I found this article at Slashdot. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why anyone outside of the Justice Department would think this is a good idea. For the first time in my life, I might want to rally around Russ Feingold on an issue.
<p>Not even <a href="http://www.freestateproject.org/">the Free State Project</a> can save us from this. I might just have to leave the country.</p>
By
anders pearson
04 Apr 2003
knoppix saved the day again today.
if you haven't played with knoppix before, it's worth a look. in a nutshell, it's a full Debian GNU/Linux system complete with kde 3.1, open office, mozilla and about every other piece of linux software you could imagine. all crammed onto one bootable cd-rom. take the cd and put it in any x86 machine and boot from it and in about a minute or two, you'll be sitting in front of a fully working kde desktop running off a RAM disk (it will also autodetect and use any linux swap partitions it finds on the host machine). all drives are mounted read-only by default so it won't overwrite your windows installation or anything nasty like that.
one of the really sweet things about knoppix is that its hardware detection is fantastic. every machine i've tried it on, old or new, it's picked up and properly configured every piece of strange hardware. seriously, it puts Redhat and the other commercial linux vendors to shame. with no other distribution have i not had to configure anything. for hardware detection knoppix leaves every other distro i've tried and windows in the dust and may even surpass MacOS.
i first burned myself a knoppix disk when i was getting ready to install gentoo on a machine and wanted to make sure i had a good rescue disk in case i screwed something up in the process. sure enough, i screwed things up a few times and knoppix came in quite handy. normal rescue disks just give you a text console and enough utilities to repair messed up partitions, compile a new kernel, etc. knoppix gave me all those utilities plus a full graphical desktop and a network connection, so if i didn't know exactly what i'd done wrong, i could search online forums or use IRC to get some help. (and, if you don't like the idea of being stuck at a text console for the first few days of a gentoo install before you've gotten X-windows and all that stuff compiled, you can install gentoo from knoppix).
i've been told that some road warrior computer consultants now travel without a laptop. they just carry a knoppix cd and a USB compactflash drive or some other USB memory device. then, when they arrive at their client's office they just grab any free machine, boot from the knoppix cd, plug in the CF drive and tell knoppix to use that as their home directory.
since it just mounts drives read-only by default, it's also a great way to demo linux to people who have never played with it before. just pop the cd in and they can immediately start trying out linux without having to go through any disk partitioning and time-consuming installations. since it's running off a compressed disk image on a CD, applications are a little slow to load, but otherwise its performance is quite acceptable.
the second time knoppix really came in handy for me was right after lani moved in. her computer didn't survive the move, but she had some Word docs on a CD that she needed to make some changes to and send back to her previous employer asap. my computer was still only partway through a gentoo install and i didn't have openoffice installed on it yet. since gentoo compiles everything from source, installing openoffice would potentially have taken many hours that she didn't really have. luckily, i remembered that knoppix included openoffice so we just booted that and she was able to edit her documents that way.
it came in useful again a few days later when lani's friend from russia was visiting. she wanted to check her email but couldn't find any computers around that properly supported cyrillic. knoppix has good support for russian and a number of other languages, so the knoppix disk came out again and pretty soon we had a cyrillic desktop up and running for her.
today, a coworker's windows machine crashed hard and refused to reboot. the harddrive was making strange noises and giving off error messages left and right. obviously the drive was failing. naturally, there were very important documents on the drive that hadn't been backed up anywhere else and would be very time-consuming to recreate if they couldn't be recovered. peter and i booted off knoppix. the drive kept generating errors during the boot process and i was doubtful that anything could recover the files at that point. somehow though, knoppix managed to mount it, and peter was able to copy the files off and upload them to an ftp server with no problem.
being easy for newbies to use and a powerful tool for expert users is a rare combination. it's been a long time since i've been as impressed with a piece of software as i have been with knoppix. to actually use as a long term system, i prefer gentoo these days, but from now on i plan to keep a knoppix disk nearby.