Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

July 30, 2004 18:48 +0000 | Geek Stuff Miscellaneous 2

i laughed out loud at the diesel sweeties today. and i have a present for fans of the oh my gods strip. your very own icon set ...if you run linux ;-) if any of you poor windows folk find a way to convert nice, shiny 32-bit pngs to those ugly 8bit windows icons, send me the zip file and i'll post them here. (and yes, i'm aware of the irony of posting linux icons in a zip file, but i figure most of you will want them anyway and linux people can read anything.)

July 21, 2004 03:23 +0000 | Geek Stuff Miscellaneous 3

lately i've been watching last exile, an anime series i discovered at the anime party i went to a while back. i've been watching so much in fact, that the story line and characters have invaded my dreams these last few nights. kinda odd, that. but i understand now that there's really no reason to get cable. there's nothing good on, and all the really good stuff is only available online anyway.

seriously, get your hands on this series. it's only 26 episodes and it's really quite... beautiful. yes. that's the best word for it. when it finished tonight i asked myself why i wasted so many years watching all that crap on tv when stuff like this has been around for so long. great writing, drawing, and character development and it's all infinitely more creative than nearly everything else on tv. if you ask nice, i'm sure i can even find someone who can hook you up. really great stuff -- have i said that enough yet?

July 09, 2004 05:55 +0000 | Geek Stuff 2

i had initially written a rather long posting with some nifty links to some interesting news articles, but my whole machine locked up when i was nearly finished so i lost everything.

so instead, i posted this bug.

July 05, 2004 14:03 +0000 | Geek Stuff 2

and i'm going to enter.
i don't know if i'll even make it into the top 5, but it'll be fun anyway.
when i'm finished, i'll post the result here.

June 22, 2004 03:53 +0000 | Geek Stuff 1

this morning i went to work and when i noticed someone was checking out my blog, i went to see what pages they were looking at, and was rather surprised to see that the entire site was b0rked. i had been putting off making a summer theme and this morning when the clock turned to midnight, my blogger switched from the spring theme, to the non-existent summer theme. (oops).

i've scrambled to get something up, and i'm reasonably happy with it, but i'll likely be toying around with it in the coming weeks.

June 10, 2004 00:12 +0000 | Geek Stuff 3

a spammer tried to post to my blog today. some garbage about casinos and some such. but the unholy butthole didn't succeed -- most likely i think because of the combination of my anti-spammer code and the fact that i'm not using a "standard" blogger package. the incident was enough for me to reconsider some additional filtering in my comments section though. adding a filter for keywords like "viagra", "sluts" and "casinos" would probably kill the majority of it. either that, or i can see about integrating spam assassin.

for the curious, the spammer ips have now been banned at the network level using iptables (that's my firewall for the non-geek audience). the ips will be added to a list and posted on my blog for the world to see ;-) but for now, here's the few i grabbed out of my logs:

61.66.137.2
66.117.204.210
80.26.34.114
193.224.42.8
200.58.141.84
200.104.23.143
200.105.133.78
212.0.138.14
213.156.35.190
217.34.33.132

i wish i could do more with this. chances are the ips are spoofed, but i'm really not concerned about the idea of blocking them anyway.

June 07, 2004 19:00 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

would you believe it? i actually got a hold of a real person at microsoft! the site i'm working on @work is having issues sending "thanks for signing up" emails to hotmail users, so i put an email in to the redmond monopolists and i just now got a real person response from someone named "julie" i'm quite excited.

apologies for not blogging these past few days. i will post some stuff of interest soon. i'm almost finished two very big things ;-)

June 03, 2004 22:52 +0000 | Geek Stuff Society & Culture 3

this may be under the "geek stuff" section, but i really do suggest that you read this bit, you don't have to be technically minded to understand.

slashdot is currently reporting that micros~1 has patented the double-click. you read that right. apparently, the boys in redmond have decided that the concept of clicking twice on something with your mouse is a trade secret and is therefore their property.

ok, so microsoft is insane, so what. why is this our problem? i mean, most everyone uses windows anyway, so if they own a patent on something we all use their product to do, what's the big deal? well i'm not going to re-hash something that's already very well documented elsewhere, so i'll just give you what the foundation for a free information infrastructure already has:

Unlike copyright, patents can block independent creations. Software patents can render software copyright useless. One copyrighted work can be covered by hundreds of patents of which the author doesn't even know but for whose infringement he and his users can be sued. Some of these patents may be impossible to work around, because they are broad or because they are part of communication standards.

so to put it another way. if your company writes a nifty little app that orders pizza from your favourite restaurant with a few double-clicks, be prepared to get sued.

[ rant ] i don't care what you think about Free software. and i don't care about whether you think microsoft is evil or not. this is retarded. things like copyright and patents were designed to encourage innovation and preserve the interests of the majority. instead they're being used to maintain and expand monopolies held by corporations that don't give a fuck about the rest of us. corporations are positioning themselves all over the world to hold a controlling interest in everything from your country's foreign policy to what you eat for breakfast and it's gotta go. [ /rant ]

if you live in Canada, you have a national election coming up at the end of this month. why not put a call into your candidates and ask what they think?

May 18, 2004 13:28 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

well some of you may have noticed but i uploaded the new blogger code changes a couple days ago. i just didn't want to mix this post in with mention of iraqi prisoner torture or my trip to ottawa. but it's here now. new features include:

fixt the anti-spammer code in the comments. now only specific code is allowed in there including basic stuff like: <div>, <span>, and <a>. yes, i'm aware that with some creative coding you can do some rather fun stuff with even those tags, but it'll prevent dumb shit like javascript auto-redirects and intentional breaking of the layout to some degree
blogger links are now highlighted: wyrdsister, jeanie, lavendarglass, anna, smyli. see? isn't it nifty?
the search engine has been modified to let you limit the number of days you want to search. this is handy if you only want stuff from the last 10days or so. i've also set it up so that an administrator can search for '' (nothing) and bring up everything... handy if you want a list of comments posted in the last x days.
i added two new modules to the sidebar: "tv that doesn't suck" -- 'cause it occured to me that there's so very little, and a content licence handled by the creative commons. the gist of the licence is that you can copy and distribute anything you see here, but not for profit.

...and that's about it. small update this time through i suppose. i'm working on a better way to handle the stylesheets lately, so that'll likely be the next big change.

May 03, 2004 05:37 +0000 | Geek Stuff Nifty Links Society & Culture 2

get soulseek. it's the shiz-nit. i was able to find all the music AND software i wanted... even the ones i couldn't find on kazaa. it's VERY cool.