AT&T can help you make your own Middle Earth movie, right in your own home! Just go to their Text-to-Speech Interactive Multi-Lingual Demo page. Now enter something appropriate in the text box. I thought this sounded pretty good:
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost, for none now live who remember it.Next, select the voice to use. You want 'Audrey .... UK English'. She's by far the most elfish. Push the "SPEAK" button and record your dialog. Presto! Instant dialog with a fake english accent. And you don't have to encounter even the fainest whiff of patchouli to get the sound bytes. That's an extra bonus, IMO.
While I admit that the concept of impersonating an elf (or your average sexually ambiguous non-bather from Seattle with a British affectation) is fascinating, I had a much better time having 'Reiner .... German' say stuff like "Vee want zeh money Lay-bow-skee! Give uss zeh money, or we'll cut off your johnson." (Yes, even though Reiner is supposedly German, you have to spell out the dialog in "Hun fashion" like a Sherwood Schwartz script.) Hey, at least I kept it rated PG. I mean, I didn't completely devolve into base humor...
And 'Alain .... French'? Don't even get me started. I didn't even make it to opening Google in a new window before I realized George Bush's State of the Union address was just too obvious. But working within their 36 word limit was just too much of a constraint to keep my interest from waning, and so I leave the TTS system for another day.
Living examples of this tree called a Wollemi Pine, which was though to have been extinct for about two million years, were found a few years ago in Australia. Well, according to this BBC article, botanists have figured out a way to best cultivate the plant in a commercial setting. In other words, in 2005 you can have a 200 million year old tree on your porch. Which is the coolest thing I've heard in a long, long time. I'm getting one of these for certain.
There was a big earthquake in Japan today (well from the persective of my time zone, it happened tomorrow morning, but you get the idea). The story says it was a 7.8, but they're now saying it was an 8.0. Which just sucks regardless. Damn.
The NOAA/NWS issued a tsunami warning as well. Waves up to 8 feet high will hit parts of Japan. If you look closely at that warning, it says that La Jolla, CA (which is about 10 miles from my house) will not have a tsunami warning, but that waves caused by the quake will hit at around 11:36pm. I'm seriously tempted to drive down there and see if the surf looks any bigger. I mean, how's that for global perspective? You can sit there contemplating a major distaster half a world away while watching the effects right there at your feet.
UPDATE: The USGS has a really cool image of the time it takes for the waves to move across the ocean.
I would like everyone to know that I am exercising considerable restaint. Every erg of my would-be super powers are, at this very second, while I type this, being expending against holding back the constant onslaught of thoughts of this sitting in one of these running that.
It's getting very hard to resist. It's like I can feel my fingers typing a credit card number into an ecommerce web site. I can almost see the FedEx tracking page and smell the new electronics coming out of the packaging. I imagine myself pouring over the details of the boot-up screen and then adding -m64 targets to gcc.
But I'm above all that. The 1.33GHz chip in my main machine is plenty fast for what I use it for. I just need to keep repeating that, and try to concentrate on my work. And not go to pricewatch. No, I mustn't do that. That would be regressive.
There's this image making the email rounds which is supposedly an oil tanker heading into Hurricane Isabel. I got it in email yesterday, and proceeded to email it out to some friends. It's a cool pic. The problem is that it's not Hurricane Isabel. It's not recent either. It's not even from the Atlantic. According to the National Weather Service it's Cyclone Graham, which hit the Pacific in 2002.
Thanks to Pete, who gave me the straight dope (and the above link) in a reply to my email, I was able to contact everyone's favorite urban legend authority Snopes, who has a "research in progress" page on the image.
I'm all about keyboards. I've belabored the point enough to prove that. But some people take a keyboard fetish a little too far.
Oh yeah, one more keyboard update, and then I'm done forever: Index Computer apparently got wise to the fact that they were sitting on a keyboard goldmine. They're for those $20 keyboards I bought last week. Supply and demand, or referrer logs? Your guess is as good as mine.
You have t' talk like a pirate tomorrow, or else thar'll be some swabbin'o't'poopdeck in your future.
And just so that you can practice for the big day, you might try running some of H-Dawg's fine prose through the English-to-Pirate Translator:
Ay yo, wassup, Gs? If y'all aksed me what paradise wuz to tha H-Dog, I'd say it be three things: customas payin' they accountz on time without me having to go all Walkin' Tall on they ass, a endless supply o' Nutrageous barz in tha break-room vendin' machine, an' last but not least, a seven-day work week wit' no muthafukkin' dayz off to fuck wit' mah flow.
A while ago, I wrote about how Dan turned me on to a source for clicky, heavy, buckling spring keyboards made from the same parts IBM used to manufacture. He found US supplier for the new units at $50 each, I found a parts reclamation place that had like-new original IBMs for 20 bucks. So I had to let him know of my find. I can't have him recommending knock-off keyboards at $50 when you can get the real deal at less then half the price! Seriously, for the price of one new keyboard sent Down Under, an Aussie could get two IBMs shipped to him. That's getting more for your keyboard dollar. I couldn't, in good conscience, let him keep telling people about the pricey keyboards -- even if that means the reclamation place will sell out their old stock sooner. There's my good deed for the day. Any deities dealing out bad karma can kiss my ass.
By the way, the keyboards work great. My second shipment came in today, as a matter of fact. I actually ordered only three more for 4 total. That's two spares which, given the MTBF of each buckling spring, ought to last me well into my twilight years. That should be fine. Even if they all broke tomorrow I'd still have my Keytronics keyboard collection, most of which are nearly as heavy and clicky as the IBMs. I think I have nearly two dozen keyboards total so I should be OK.
What?
Some people have lots of shoes. Some people have lots of tools. I'm sure any random artist has lots of paintbrushes laying around. How many sneakers do you need? How many slotted screwdrivers? You carry that same brush where ever you go and re-use it? I get around via the network and use the keyboard to do so. It's also what lets me build things for my work. And I relax using it, on several different machines, in several different places. So there.
It's not like I collect women's underwear or anything...
So I just noticed that PHP's < a href="http://php.he.net/manual/en/function.date.php">date() fucntion will let you convert dates and times into something called Swatch Internet Time. Can someone tell me what the hell is up with this? Did I miss that memo which said the current UTC/GMT/Zulu time system that everyone and their bank uses isn't working? Did we need a new time system?
And what's up with dividing the day into 1,000 "beats"? One thousand is a really stupid number to use. Computers don't think in units of ten. People do, but divide the day into three equal work shifts if you don't believe me when I say 1,000 beats per day is just a moronically arbitrary number. Someone wasn't thinking when they came up with that one. You'd think a watch company would understand how time works.
Seriously, can anyone look at a normal analog clock and figure out what time it is in Swatch Time? No? You mean you can't figure the number of minutes from midnight in Switzerland and then divide by 86.4 to get the current time in beats? You can't do that? Idiot. You're not part of the digerati. You should just buy a if you want to tell time like all the cool people do.
The word "hoodwink" just popped into my head. Oh wait... so did "swindle". Nope, now I've moved one to "hornswaggle" and "bamboozle". OK, I've settled on plain old "scam".
Swatch Internet Time. A more completely pure load bullshit you will not find.
So when you find that you can't print a document, you mosey on over to your wife's Windows XP mcahine (to which the printer is attached), and you turn on the monitor to discover that it's BSOD'ed, what do you do? I don't know what you do. I'll tell you what I do. I take a picture of it. Then I transcribe the text (weird capitalization and all). Then I go grab the lastest version of xscreensaver, find the source to the BSOD hack, add in the WinXP crash. Then I make a patch and submit it to the author so everyone can see the XP goodness without actually having to put up with using Windows.
No better way to spend a lunch hour, lemme tell ya.
Today I got to find out what's worse than having an office mate that listens to hip hop/dance music: having an office mate that listens to Michael Jackson. But even worse than that? Can it be possible? I didn't think so until he started singing along. Out of key.
And here I had gone so very long without hearing Michael Jackson's "music", too...
It's not often that I can cross something off my project list, so when I can it's a happy day. I finally have a cooling solution for my office, something which I've been planning to do for over three years. Here's a picture of the item in question. I've had it running for about 25 minutes and my office is at least 10 degrees cooler than it used to be. I think for the first time since I moved in, my office is the same temperature as the rest of the house.
Originally I was going to install a fan in the ceiling, which would have an added benefit of venting the attic as well. But after thinking about it, I decided that since I only need cooling in the summer, cutting a hole in my roof wasn't totally necessary. Besides, I couldn't find all the ducting and such that I would have needed (and the largest fan I could find only moved 300 CFM of air, which wouldn't do very much for me). So I decided to replace the box fan that was sitting in my window with something a little more potent. The box fan was on its last legs as well. It made a noise like a rat with a hot nail through its eye on any speed but low, and that provided very little ventilation. Home Depot sells fans for venting attics, and I bought one of those.
The first incarnation of the window unit had a plywood insert which the window would close to. I figured that this would help keep down on the noise from outside. After thinking about that idea in conjunction with my monster fan, it looked like vibration would be a factor, and so I had to figure out something else. Then it occurred to me that I could literally replace my window fan.
It's ugly as hell, but it was easy to build and the parts were cheap (the fan itself was $49.00; everything else came to like twenty bucks). It's just a couple two-by-four frames held together with some angle bracket. The fan bolts onto the front frame, and the rear frame holds the power switch and thermostat. The wire mesh on the front and back keeps fingers out of harm's way. It even has features too: there's a carrying hadle on the top of the front frame and cord storage on the left side of the rear. It gets power from a repurposed extension cord. And because it was made to mount in attics, the motor has built in thermal protection.
The one drawback is that it's a little loud. But since fan noise has never bugged me much, it's not that big of a deal. Besides, I have the thermostat tweaked so that it'll shut off at night. During the day car noise is drowned out by the white noise of the fan, so that's actually a bonus. Frankly, I'll put up with a little noise if it means my office is cooler than the average suana.
My little cash register -- which is doing triple duty as external web server, remote login server and (via the LED-on-a-stick) wall clock -- has served me well:
[root@ext grub]# uptime 12:41am up 193 days, 12:23, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.48, 0.41
But the last iptables bug requires a new kernel, and that means a reboot. Goodbye uptime. We'll see you again next March...
Having an office mate that listens to house/dance music, of course.
He's not a bad guy, really. Kinda acts/looks like someone you might see in the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, though. Hair gel, very clean shaven, tan, and a predilection for jeans that have bleached-out, "worn" areas on the thighs. That sort of thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Update: In case I wasn't totally clear, my new office mate is completely straight. He's quite a hit with the ladies at work apparently. I was only trying to describe him, not relate anything about his sexual preferences. He's not gay, just stylish. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
As a public service, I offer a link to a list of Unpatched IE security holes. I think I may change this to the default home page on the Windows 98 laptop downstairs (which probably needs to be re-imaged by now; it's been 4 years and is pretty crufty).
I'm sitting here at home, sick. I've had some non-specific flu like thing since I woke up Sunday morning. High temp (104.something at one point), shakes, sweats. Lots of aches and pains. Joy. So I decided to do something besides veg out in front of a video game: I'll patch all my machines. Red Hat has a program called up2date which (normally) makes this easy. It's like Windows Update: you run it, it connects up to special servers on its own network and finds out what your machine needs. Then it downloads and installs whatever it found missing.
While attempting to get everything current on one of my Linux boxes, I ran into an error:
[wee@localhost tmp]$ sudo up2date --nox -u There was an SSL error: [('SSL routines', 'SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE', 'certificate verify failed')]
After digging around a bit, I found out why. This is, literally, lame. Simply put, the tool used on Red Hat systems to update software packages can't be updated by itself. It needs a new certificate so that it can continue to use SSL, but it can't seem to get that new cert (and whatever else it may need) like it gets any other piece of software. I mean, up2date will even get a new kernel, but it can't get an SSL cert? Something's not right. I think someone somewhere screwed up. I suspect that this is the only time people will need to update up2date manually.
As for the fix: You need to install all the up2date packages manually. You just download them and then run RPM manually. I first have to find out what I have on my system so I know what packages to get from Red Hat:
[wee@localhost tmp]$ rpm -qa | grep up2date up2date-gnome-3.1.23.1-5 up2date-3.1.23.1-5
'up2date-3.1.23.1-5' is the actual installer tool's package, 'up2date-gnome-3.1.23.1-5' is a package with some gui stuff for the up2date program. I need both, so I'll go get the URL of the main up2date package from redhat.com and install it.
[wee@localhost tmp]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Retrieving http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: up2date = 3.1.23.1 is needed by (installed) up2date-gnome-3.1.23.1-5
Well, this mostly sucks. The old up2date-gnome package says that it needs the old up2date package, and won't let me install. Ok. I'll install the new up2date-gnome package then...
[wee@localhost tmp]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Retrieving http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: up2date = 3.1.23.2 is needed by up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1
I had a feeling this would happen. The new up2date-gnome package needs the new up2date package and it won't let me install. So I have to tell up2date to ignore any dependencies, which is not normally a good thing and should never required. You can get your system into a real mess with unmatched dependencies.
[wee@localhost tmp]$ sudo rpm --nodeps -Uvh http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Retrieving http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:up2date ########################################### [100%]
Gee, it worked.
[wee@localhost tmp]$ sudo rpm --nodeps -Uvh http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Retrieving http://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:up2date-gnome ########################################### [100%]
So up2date is ready to patch my machine. Why did it have to be this hard though? For what it's worth, there's a way to avoid this dependency issue, but it's not normally the way I do it.
When I get packages over the network (eg, ones I don't want to actually download and save someplace locally), I let RPM get them. That's what I did above. If you give the rpm command an initial list of packages as arguments it's (usually) smart enough to figure out that it should ignore any deps between the ones it's been given. But I don't usually paste big long URLs when I want to give it multiple RPM packages to install. I tend to just grab them all and save them to some temp directory and use a wildcard. Like so:
[wee@rh8 tmp]$ sudo rpm -Uvh up2date-* Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:up2date ########################################### [ 50%] 2:up2date-gnome ########################################### [100%]
No errors (even though there were "internally").
Why'd I post all this? Because RPM is in many ways broken. Because I've had to focus my dayquil-addled mind to run through all these arcane commands on every single Linux box I own. Because there's a workaround of sorts for dependency errors. And to put in a new plug for apt for rpm, which I will be using instead of up2date in a few short months. I used to think that upcoming switch wasn't going to be by choice, but I'm reconsidering that status more and more lately.
