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I miss IRC

Ah, the good old says when the interweb was young, and to chat in a group required IRC.

Fazin pointed out a quote tonight at the site Bash.org which is just filled with quotes from IRC taking me back to another time. I highly recommend spending an hour and going through their top 100. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

A few favorites I saw:

#406373:

< [TN]FBMachine> i got kicked out of barnes and noble once for moving all the bibles into the fiction section

#9081:

Spin: arrrr, pirates of the south west

Spin: thar be large pipes o’bandwith near ye’ol univarsety.

Pirate: yearg, ye may be an ta somethan thar.

Spin: what say ye we pull yonder USB hard disk longside yonder NMSU puter and begin tha lutin and plunderin.

Pirate: yearg. The master done gaved me a testin machine with a grand ol CDR.

Pirate: Avast!

Pirate: MP3s off the starboard bow!

Spin: stere clear of ye porn pop ups rollin in from tha east.

Pirate: I have mah trusty Opera browsa to help me fend em off.

Spin: encrypt the data holds, batton down thar security patches, argh thar be spyware abound.

#202477:

(Mootar) morons.

(Mootar) these people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless

(Mootar) they must think they’re super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network

(Mootar) unfortunatly, the connection works both ways

(Mootar) long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer

#205195:

(mortalkombat) stfu mat|t u cu.nt

* Acaila sets mode: +b MortalKombat!*@*

( @Acaila) FINISH HIM

(mat |t) rofl

(mortalkombat) omg wtf man

  • MortalKombat was kicked by Acaila (forward, forward, back, back, forward, punch)

( @Acaila) FATALITY!

Blog Fixed & Flickr Update

Seems since I did the security update late last week, that one of the fixes changed the permissions on the file that controls the comments, so it errored out and wasn’t accepting comments.

That’s now fixed. For the record, the error was:

Warning: comments_template (wp-content/themes/default/comments.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in (wp-includes/comment-functions.php on line 28)

According to the to the fix on the WordPress Codex it required adding a line to the style.css sheet of a theme so it looked like:

/*<br /> Template: mad1<br /> Theme Name: No Named Art Seed

However, that didn’t work for me.

SSH’ing in, and going to my wp-content directory and typing:

chmod -R 755 themes/ however did work. I don’t know if it’s a permission error on the comments file itself, or the directories, but comments are back.

In related news, I’ve come across some of last years digital photo’s and am in the process of uploading them to Flickr, including the ones from Packer Training Camp last year. So some of the timelines will be out of date for a few days, as I upload them and I’ll finish ’em off with this past weekends Fourth of July photo’s to back in to real-time.

My favorite Packer photo is Robert Ferguson making a spectacular one-handed catch at full extension in the air:

dsc00120

Trent Reznor gets it

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gets it. It being the remix culture.

Mr. Reznor has released the second single, Only to be remixed. The Hand That Feeds was the first single released, in Garage Band format only at the time.

This time around, it’s been released in 4 different file formats, including Acid Express and Garage Band so Windows users have a shot at remixing this time. I have a copy of the former around somewhere, and the latter on my Mini. I might try my hand at it this time.

It’s very cool of NIN to give back to the community. I downloaded a few of the remixes for The Hand That Feeds last time, and some were pretty good.

Cursed, I tell you

I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.

It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.

One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:

  1. My server
  2. Athlon 64 box
  3. Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
  4. Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card

Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.

To recap:

The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.

Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.

Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.

Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.

Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.

Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.

Podcasting now in iTunes

Sheesh, I mention the other day how I’ve gotten in to podcasting in a big way, and then Apple goes and makes it mainstream just to copy me (no, really!).

Apple’s iTunes 4.9 now has Podcasting support. Windows users can download Apple’s iTunes 4.9 here. Suppose I should fire up the old Mac Mini and take a look.

And for the record, I’ve been downloading podcasts for the last year intermittently, and burning them to CD for long car rides. Just hadn’t done the whole automated thing.

Supreme Court rules against Grokster

The verdict is in this morning and the Supreme Court has ruled against Grokster in MGM vs. Grokster.

Here’s a couple of key points from the article:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that companies that sell file-sharing software can be held liable for copyright infringement.

(Emphasis mine) – Companies that market and sell P2P software for the sole purpose of infrigmenent is what the court is saying. Software such as bittorrent – which was developed to transfer large files such as movie trailers and linux distributions – wouldn’t be an issue. That, and bittorrent is free.

“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.

The Supreme Court has remanded the case back to the lower court that originally ruled for Grokster.

The good news is that 1984’s Betamax ruling is still law. Devices made, that could infringe, can still be made. What the court has said is don’t create a device and market to the fact that it’s only made to infringe copyright. The bad news is, that burden of proof is now on the manufacturer’s to prove that they didn’t create and/or market to the fact that a device can infringe.

It’s not over yet. I’ll update the post when the EFF gets their opinion up.

Google to launch video service Monday

John Battelle’s blog has the whole story:

I’ve confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google’s video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

This is big. Mr. Battelle goes on to theorize that this is a shot against Microsoft in the coming war as Windows Media Player is a stand-alone app with it’s own DRM issues.

VLC is a pretty cool project. I’ve been using it on Linux and Windows since January when The Current launched so I could listen to the AACPlus feed. VLC does it all – video, music, streaming, server, it’s a pretty amazing piece of software and it will be very interesting to see what Google has done to it and how it continues to evolve.

Joining the revolution



podcasting, originally uploaded by silwenae.

I’ve joined the podcasting revolution, and am now downloading podcasts like a madman. Shown here are iPodder on Ubuntu, and the new Monopod, a much more simpler and user friendly podcasting client. Both are running on Ubuntu Hoary.

I had a really tough time last weekend trying to get Monopod 0.2 to work, and this is 0.3 (I had to install a bunch of dev stuff). iPodder was ok, it’s the latest release that came out this week, but you have to chmod one file before it will work.

My two favorite podcasts so far are:

Acts of Volition and MAKE Magazine’s Podcast.

More to come, and a rant about my MP3 player.

Turn your laptop into a picture fram

Turn your laptop into a hangable, on the wall, picture frame.

It has to be seen to be believed. Disassemble your laptop, mount it to a picture frame, and just follow the step by step instructions.

Think about it if he wasn’t using XP: you could take some really, really old laptops that can be had cheap and do a bunch of them using say, free software like Linux. 🙂

Nevertheless, a very cool hacking project.