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August 26, 2004
Laws Gone Wild
In what has to be the most absurb arrest ever, the news article makes it almost all worth it. Check it out for a good laugh.
Posted by Dan at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2004
The Power of the Internet
The power of the Intar-net can now be seen with BugMeNot! Wired news has an article on the temporary demise and return of my favorite anti-registration site.
Why do I prefer it? Mainly because I hate having to make up a new identity each time I want to go back to the site. Why do I make up new identities? Mainly because there is no need to track that specific amount of user data for news. None. Sorry, but marketing efforts will need to be spent in other ways.
As an odd side note, it seems that BugMeNot shows up under Apple's spell checker as wrong. The alternative suggested: arguement.
Posted by Dan at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)
Looking for Toys
If anyone happens to know where I might find the specification for ASF, or more importantly how to read an ASF file and write one, I'd appreciate a hint.
Posted by Dan at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)
Starting Over
Been busy getting acquainted with my new position but finally figured out a few things here locally. Turns out upgrading to the latest Gallery isn't such a hot idea if you've been hacking around with the HTML code. Seems the initial picture frames were borked for a short while. Finally figured out how to correct them, mostly by just re-generating the alterations in the new default files.
One of the bigger problems I've been having is email forwarding. One of the users local to this system has a real email address on a Verizon Online site. All his email is sent through a virtuser entry locally, and that forwards to his Verizon account. For a long time this hasn't been working as suspected, mainly because Verizon has added some really harsh anti-spam rules. A friend suggested trying the SRS utility. After installing it via FreeBSD ports, I discovered a few things.
First the port install doesn't check your version of Perl. If you happen to be running the default version of Perl (v.5.005) you will find nothing works. Why? Because you need the warnings.pm file to exist. This is easily fixed by upgrading your version of perl to something usable and then doing a "use.perl ports" to ensure everyone is happy. The port though should check for this.
Second, despite having everything working, none of this solved anything for forwarding to a Verizon email address. Anyone know why that might be? The most common reason cited in the postmaster emails is:
(reason: 550 You are not allowed to send mail:sc004pub.verizon.net)
UPDATE: finally figured out what was wrong with the SRS install. To make things right, I followed the directions by Mark @ asarian, which went rather easily. The catch was building from the m4 file. It seems that when being rebuilt by FreeBSD's make command, some of the lines were not inserted into the proper place. By copy and pasting them to the locations as specified in the document above, it works fine.
[EDIT: corrected some grammar mistakes]
Posted by Dan at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2004
I'm Late I'm Late..
.. for a very important date. It seems somehow that Lisa has a birthday today. Woah. I think that makes her like 2 or something like that.
Posted by Dan at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2004
Oh What Fun it is to..
I'm constantly amazed at the foresight of functionality found on OS X. For example, in under 5 minutes last night I was able to use a cellular telephone equipped with Bluetooth and GPRS to work as my temporary internet connection. Now the fun part was sharing it over my 802.11G connection to a few other people around me, and realizing all of this took no more than a few button clicks. Very cool. Very easy.
Now if only I could get the GPRS system to work faster than a 14.4 modem...
Posted by Dan at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2004
PHPs odbc_fetch functions
Dave Lawson had sent out a patch a little while ago on the php-internals list with a collection of patches for the ODBC system. He basically took out the useless ID numbering system ODBC has in place relying upon the system in Zend for resource management, and a second patch that forces a ecalloc instead of an emalloc for the SQLExtendedFetch failure points.
While the first is something I've toyed with doing a lot, I've just never felt it was that big a deal really to bother with it. The second patch is one I'm not entirely sure about. While his patch works fine, I think the basic assumption and means to correcting it are not the best possible path. Mainly because it forces a reliance upon the behavior of a section of code instead of being reliant upon the return status/codes of a series of functions. Regardless, it needs testing and due to circumstances beyond my control I cannot test it completely/throughly at the moment. As such, I've committed the ecalloc patch for testing and use in the generated snapshots. Hopefully if something is not working, someone will email me and let me know. Platform of interest is MS Access, which has historically been the most finicky of the ODBC systems.
Oh yeah, I should mention that it's not that the ecalloc patch is wrong or going to be harmful in anyway at the moment. In fact, for what it does, it's really quite a nice temporary solution to a more systemic problem of the ODBC module. My point of concern with it comes from future evolution of the ODBC module, where this behavior may not be assured, or more importantly not recognized/remembered when extending the ODBC module.
Posted by Dan at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
August 09, 2004
Updates not a go-go
Updates will be slow for a few days. Packing and moving to a new place have taken a top priority right now, and internet access is sporadic at times. Goods times were had though recently when Charles and I went to the Yuengling brewery. Free beer is always good.
Posted by Dan at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2004
Biggest Blunder of the Post-DotCom?
Looks like everyone's favorite search engine did something bad. CNN is there in all the glory and details. With so many people expecting Google to bring life back into the IPO market, I'm very surprised they let such an event happen. I'm still lost as to why they set such a high offer point, at about 100$ is typically the point of splitting a stock.
Posted by Dan at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2004
Mainstream attention
Looks like Wired.com's Adam L. Penenberg is also noticing the backlash against web site registrations.
I'm not entirely sure that his argument towards a single login system would be any better, but his non-scientific polling is pretty accurate when asking other net news viewers. I do wonder why the news services aren't as concerned about incorrect viewer data though...
Posted by Dan at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)