January 2003 Archives

Had great fun tonight with Scott and John at The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto watching a couple of classic noir films, This Gun for Hire and The Blue Dahlia. In The Blue Dahlia, there is a scene where a woman is found dead, and the shot of the pathway and the approach to the house is amazingly (eerily so) similar to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. For those of you who've seen the movie and still have questions (I expect many of you to), Salon.com's guide is top-notch. Obviously, don't read the article if you've not seen the movie but plan on it at some time.

The theater is amazing - complete with old-time pipe organist, rising and descending on the stage between movies. It's great fun to be in a theater, watching classic movies with friends on a Friday night. Large turnout, too, I was pleasantly surprised. I plan on doing this more often...

My interest in noir probably originated from my junior high school days, reading The Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie.

Started coughing around 5 pm tonight. Not a good sign of things to come. Friday, I'll probably stumble into work with a cold/flu, headache and the usual nasal inconviences. It's a dry cough, too, which means it's probably the flu. I had my first-ever flu shot late last year, and I wonder if I'm just now receiving the smaller outbreaks of the influenza. I've been stressed out and sleep-deprived lately, which obviously doesn't help the situation.

Here's to February returning me to a normal schedule, one hopes.

Tonight I saw Joe Gould's Secret and Niagara. The latter is a good, albeit short noir movie - though the plot could have been much more developed, it was still enjoyable (Marilyn Monroe starred...) In the 'I'm also embarrassed to mention it category', I 'saw' Eight-Legged Freaks (by this I mean I fast-forwarded through largely 7/8 of the movie). Pavlov was right, this movie isn't even in the 'so bad it's good' category. Avoid it!

I was famous once, though not as famous as Blake.

I'm one of the only people that I know that like Smashing Pumpkins' Adore, which is surprising, since I think it's an outstanding album. On a similar note (no pun intended), the new ZWAN CD is great!

In the 'Microsoft amazes me more daily' category, Microsoft didn't patch a large number of their own servers from the SQL Slammer worm.

"All apps and services are potentially affected and performance is sporadic at best," Mike Carlson, director of data center operations for Microsoft's Information Technology Group, stated in an e-mail sent at 8:04 a.m. PST Saturday to other members of Microsoft's operations groups. "The network is essentially flooded with traffic, making it difficult to gather details concerning the impact."

The full CNET news article is here.

Way to go, Bill and company!

I honestly don't know why I watch the news anymore:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Midwest/01/27/boy.chained.ap/index.html - 'Toddler found chained by neck'.

Quote - "He ran right away and hugged one of the officers and looked at the chains like they were evil," Arteaga said.

No kidding. Actually, I figured the toddler would attribute nothing but pure benevolence to the very objects that confined him to his bed without food.

I've been asked on occasion how I got here. It all started circa 1997, during my sophomore year at Indiana University at South Bend. One of my friends, during our high-school friendship (92-96), had developed and run a BBS entitled 'The Point of No Return'. In '97, our sophomore year, he dropped out college, and moved away to found DNS Online (long since sold). I didn't own a PC all through high-school (in fact, I believe I was still tinkering with my old Commodore 64), and so I didn't have much of an interest yet (my major was Audio Production, back then). However, I soon had a break-in on my car, and insurance coughed up $1,000. The quick cash drop (plus the rising need for internet access at home stemming from my mounding term paper assignments) drove the need for a PC. So I picked up a (even back then, this system was pretty cruddy) Compaq Presario 4510.

System specs:
Windows 95 OS, Intel P133 (no MMX), 16X CD-ROM, 1 GIG HD (Quantum Bigfoot - quite possibly the slowest and noisest hard drive to ever exist), integrated 16-bit soundcard, integrated 2 MB videocard, Internal Winmodem 33.6kbps

Okay, so you can already guess that I had numerous problems and upgrades with this system. On several occasions, I took the system to my friend's office and while I was there, got a feel for a hand-grown ISP, and all of the complexities of the management and operation therein. I remember private peering decisions (Qwest/UUnet/BBNPlanet?), user-to-modem ratios, bandwidth capping, policies, and several different OS configurations. He went from a full install of Microsoft BackOffice (running the now IIS, Exchange, Proxy Server, etc.) running on multiple servers, to an all Slackware-based architecture running off of an incredible single machine with 128 megs of RAM and a single IDE harddrive. (No data-striping, no RAID drive arrays, and no backups!) Several iterations later, the ISP was strong - 900 customers (some large companies hosted there), a new link with Sprintlink, that directly peered a dedicated T1 with Chicago's NAP (which I believe was operated by Ameritech), and backup/redundancy everywhere.

But the story doesn't end there - after a poor course at Ivy Tech, I decided to enroll at Clark's Career Institute as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (numerous ads had, by 1998, largely convinced impressionable youth like myself that one could make salaries in the $40k range if they had a cert.) After finishing schooling (and massively in debt), I was disillusioned, finding real employers refuse me on the lack of 'real-world experience'.

So I had plans to finish college (this time, with a Journalism degree, as my math aptitude is sorely deficient.). Working at a boring job and armed with my love for the catalyst of the World Wide Web's graphical proliferation (Netscape), I began testing binaries of Mozilla (I started with M3.)

I saw an open req on Netscape's corporate site and on a whim (and with much hand-holding from several key people working on Mozilla) applied, and I've been here since November 13th, 2000.

Hope you all have an enjoyable Super Bowl XXXVII experience today. I'm team indifferent, especially since whether or not the Oakland Raiders win, there will be riots all over this part of California.

Played about 5 great hours of Kingdom Hearts last night (yes, straight - carpel tunnel shall ensue, no doubt). Although it's a pretty linear game, it's extremely fun - what other game would have you fighting the cards in Wonderland in order to find Alice? Made it to the Tarzan level and fought a tiger - I think they've got the Jungle Book characters in here, too. Later on in the game, I'll come across all the Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Peter Pan stories.

Elmer Gantry must've been a highly controversial movie back in its day, because it was still pretty powerful when I watched it this evening. The story's message went back and forth a few times, perhaps on purpose.

This weekend, I was hoping to finish the so far, so excellent The Lighthouse at the End of the World: A Tale of Edgar Allen Poe, but it looks like I'll not be able to, since I keep procrastinating with Netflix movies and Kingdom Hearts. Thankfully, Squaresoft's bandwidth-intensive site is hosted with Internap, but on dialup there are still issues with loading content.

Even though I own a PS2 finally, I haven't any games yet. And since I own a PS2, there seems to be an endless plethora of titles available. Kingdom Hearts appeals to me because the concept seems so novel - blending Disney characters with Squaresoft ones, in an RPG setting.

Played football today in Cuesta Park - sadly, our team lost, but we all had great fun. Pavlov was playing surprisingly well (opposing team), and John Gaunt was in his defensive best on our side. I had a single touchdown, but that's not enough to makeup for my lackluster play.

Interesting that MTV's Tough Enough III featured more than a couple of tracks off of Audio Adrenaline's Lift album, which I own.

Gab Oliver spins the deepest, darkest, funkiest trance/house the world has ever known! He's got a few sets on Proton Radio, so check them out (sorry, Faisal!)

Yeah, so, I finally ditched (read: returned) my XBox system (and DVD kit) and picked up a righteous Playstation 2. Benefits are: more games (Grand Turismo: A Spec, Grand Theft Auto and Vice City, etc), a better DVD remote. Also gained is the ability to now link with practically everyone at work.

In the 'just when you'd thought you'd seen it all' category, I point you to bug 190403.

For those who desire a 'brief' summary, here's the one grafted from the bug:

'after clicking a link that opened a new window without a navigation toolbar via javascript, then opening another window, then a crash, newly launched mozilla has a blank toolbar showing, keyboard navigation is crippled, URL bar is broken and navigation bar is shown incorrectly'

Now, that could quite be the most concise bug summary I've seen in my 2-year tenure here at Netscape.

If that wasn't enough to pique your interest, consider that it has no less than 10 screenshot attachments and a total of 13 comments by the reporter!

Enjoy!

The Bourne Identity is a very cool movie indeed. Not since the days of Escape to Athena, Bullitt and Ronin have I seen a car chase that was this fun. Not to mention that Franke Potente hasn't looked this good, either. Nice to see Clive Owen cast as the sniper, as well.

If only you knew how long I boisterously I laughed while reading this article from The Onion.

Quotable line from Inuyasha's episode tonight on adult swim - "Did you come here to lecture me"? "No, I came here because a giant mantis nicked the sides of my wind tunnel, I was wondering if you could repair it".

LOL.

And, proving once again that 'knowledge' without practical application is void, I've forgotten nearly all the work that I did in JS class.

Began reading The Lighthouse at the End of the World, by Stephen Marlowe. The linga franca is rather tough (moreso almost, than the semi recently read Cryptonomicon).

Words I've come across so far (Updated: now with 100% more definitions!):

bedizenment - to dress or adorn gaudily
antipodes - the exact opposite or contrary
convivial - relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company
ambulatory - moving from place to place
maunderings - to speak indistinctly or disconnectedly
susurrant - a whispering or rustling sound
cachinnation - to laugh loudly or immoderately

Those more literary than myself might no doubt find these words to be commonplace, or at the very least familiar, but I find them to be neither. (This is all in the first 7 pages, mind you.) I'll note that the story is written from the perspective of Edgar Allen Poe himself, which may contribute to the extravagant writing.

Anyhow, I'm really going to have to have a dictionary accompany me on this read.

Wow. I just finished watching the amazing Sunset Boulevard - a great movie with plenty of depth, and enjoyable over-the-top humor, to boot.

I give this show 3 months at the most, to be cancelled.

Eek! Celine Dion is going to sing at the pre-game show for this year's Super Bowl. Oh well, I suppose it could be worse. Rosanne Barr, anyone? At least it won't be gaudy like Christina Aguilara's performance during the Olympics.

Walkabout is a great movie, but not one I'd recommend to someone who prefers the linear, formulaic Hollywood-blockbuster sort. It's a slow, progressive, and often haunting movie about man vs. nature, set in the Australian outback. Beautifully filmed, as well. The texture of it can be compared to Picnic at Hanging Rock (another one of my favorites), without the mystery that that movie employs.

The San Francisco Film Society is hosting a Film Noir event - I now realize how many classics I haven't seen.

Yet one more reason the RIAA smokes crack.

Help! Some config file is screwed up. The title of each blog isn't getting set automatically (the old code would get the first 5 strings and auto-set the title to them). I've viewed the help file, and I can't figure out where that is supposed to go. It's causing the entry links on the right side not to show up, as the titles aren't being automatically generated anymore. Sigh.

In the meantime, I've broken a lot of links to external blogs in the process. Restoring those now.

If you can help me fix the title generation issue, please email technutz@netscape.net. Thanks!

Thank you, thank you David Baron for fixing bug 169078, which fixes a ton of poorly-created websites' CSS rendering.

Jason Kersey of Mozillazine fame has recently converted all blogs into Movable Type from Blogger.com. The change is amazing; so much more flexibility was gained in the transfer.

Maybe I'll take up stoicism, in light of recent events around me.

Last night I watched the pretty good The Fisher King. Robin Williams was good (per usual), and Jeff Bridges was believable in his role as a down-on-his-luck radio disc jockey. The movie is filled with hilarious scenes, too.

Isn't this just a trip down memory lane?

Creating an Application using Mozilla with Alec Flett of the Mozilla Mail/News team
11/10/1999

Listening to Pixies - Where is My Mind?, I'm reminded what a near-perfect movie Fight Club is (for those of you who haven't seen it, it's tied-in to the also amazing ending of the movie).

I've got to remember to pick that movie up and add it to my rather small collection.

I must be missing something.

Just finished watching The Eel and wasn't feeling anything for the characters at the movie's end. Had a decently interesting beginning, but the movie turned into a car that veered off course.

CBS is going insane with Survivor, and I won't be watching Season 6 (nor future iterations either, most likely). They should limit it to once a year, but I guess they still receive ratings for it.

So, so good.

Phil K - Balance 004

I'm glad when I finish any literary work, but especially relieved to have finished The Lovely Bones -- not because it was bad, but simply because I have more pressing material to enjoy.

I'm unsure which I'll start on first; the meaty Foucault's Pendulum or The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

Just finished watching Wages of Fear - it was pretty good, but the ending was pretty predictable (at least it was foreshadowed 10 minutes prior).

Props to Armin Van Buuren. Transparence is the best pure trance CD I've ever heard (beating out Paul Van Dyk's Out There and Back album).

I've always been mystified at the format Vignette creates URIs in, so I found a document which explains the rather lengthy and human-unreadable string.

http://hostname.com/path/to/file/forceDynamic,templateID,OID,bCaps.ext

The filename consists of four parameters to StoryServer.

forceDynamic gives a hint as to whether a cached version of the page can be used or if dynamic generation is to be forced.

templateID specifies the ID of the StoryServer template to be used to genrate the page.

OID is a generic parameter for passing information to the template. Often the OID is a unique identifier pointing to the content item to be displayed. Fortune.com uses a date-encoding scheme (602YYMMDD) to identify daily news articles. Many sites overload the OID by passing multiple parameters seperated by some URL-friendly delimiter.

bCaps tells the site whether a browser-capability-specific version of the page is requested. In the past, browser capabilities (tables, frames, Java, etc) were encoded in a 16-bit value. Since more than 16 capabilities are now supprted, this parameter is now a boolean value (00|FF) and more processing is done by the web server plugin to determine browser caps.

ext can be any extension, but defaults to html.

Tivo announces new services - too bad I don't have broadband at home. The good news, though, is that in April we'll have new organization features regardless.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134492

(the above image is just linked here so I don't forget the location)

POD's Satellite:

I wonder how clear it must look from there to here
No obstruction, this selfish corruption
All in this atmosphere
No fear, less tears, only time to catch my breath
I fail to inhale
Your love constricts my chest
Confusion blinded me, mental and physically
And it's because of you that now I can see
So now can I run? I follow the Son and ride on to Zion
And dance this last song of freedom
But only time will tell, if it's truly for real
Can't change your mind, all I know this is what I feel
Whether I'm wrong or right, please keep my life in sight
And never take you eyes off me

It's truly one of a kind, like star shine, beyond night time, are you there
My eyes stare to find, just what's behind this blind notion of mine, is it
genuine
Cause sometimes, it plays tricks with my mind, some call it asinine
But it's like love or hate, now is that real or fake?
Cause it's a real thin line, but that's your choice to make
The question at hand, help me understand, is this your plan?
I think I can, can I think, then I think I can
Because I won't break (nah), and I won't shake (nah)
With lifted hands to this Man (Jah), I'll stand in faith
I'll make it through, my trust in you
Close my eyes, make a wish, kiss the sky
Hey there�I see you

Excellent. MTV will air both Sorority Life 2 and the newly created Fraternity Life:

http://www.mtv.com/onair/sorority_life/

"New Season Coming Soon!

Thought the girls of Sigma were the ultimate drama mamas? Wait 'til you meet the girls of DZO from Buffalo. Sorority Life 2 and its new "brother" show, Fraternity Life (featuring the guys of Sigma Chi Omega), will be here sooner than you can say, "Keg Stand."

I woke up bright and early (6 am) to attend Ian's Netscape Surf Camp II: The Sequel. I suited up with the rest of the assorted neophytes and established surfers, and braved the water at 8 am. The waves were met with my fiercely false bravado, which was quickly dashed as I became stuck in a current, madly paddling to achieve the unattainable goal of progress. After riding a single wave for a few moments, I quickly was pounded by a multitude of waves, which capsized my board, knocking it into my noggin. Ah, well. Such is life for such a nebbish. I'll require substantial reparative time to my upper limbs. All in all, a good time was had.

I'm quickly tiring of Fox's 24 show. You know that Jack's character will prevail, at least up until the last episode. Therefore, the little plot conventions that appear to put his character in peril are useless to my brain, and are put aside. The others threads in the show are progressing decently well, but I still just want it to be over. So much for attention spans. (How do you provide a link to a navigational element that's in Flash?) Hint: I don't think you do. I hate Flash, it is way overused.

A reviewer on Amazon.com ruined the ending of The Lovely Bones in one sentence...I have little less than 1/2 of the book to finish, too. Thanks, joker. Prefacing your review with '*** Spoilers ***' couldn't have been that hard, could it?

So this is the villain in T3!

It's finally here!

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is a great anime, though I think the first might be slightly better (however, it's been a while since I've seen it). Ninja Scroll is probably the best anime I've ever seen.

Man, my lust for an X-Box is only fueled by looking at this page, which compares the system specs. Clearly, Xbox wins on all accounts. The fact that for a few extra dollars, it plays DVDs, doesn't hurt, either.

Ancient Bill Gates rant here.

Okay, I finished watching Picnic at Hanging Rock - it was good, but not amazing. Then again, few movies are, once you've seen 1000+, like I have.

Time to stop reading and start watching Picnic at Hanging Rock - a movie which I've heard so much about and have been wanting to see for quite some time.

I'm roughly 1/2 way through The Lovely Bones, and it's finally reaching plot-momentum (the prior passages were all merely good descriptive text). Great book, so far (I disagree with the negative reviews that are found on Amazon.com).

Saw 8 1/2 last night. This movie is highly overrated.

In my TV world, TVLand is rerunning Sanford and Son and McGuyver.

Revealed with Jules Asner features Ashley Judd, tonight.

Old news, I know, but Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! (what business remained after the sale of their Enterprise Search business to Verity).

Tomorrow is 'return to work after a 12 day hiatus'. I've got so much to get caught up on (not the least of which is purging my blessed inundated inbox of reviled Spam. Normally, this is a task which occupies a 30 minute period, but you can imagine what 12 cold days of accumulation can bring.

On a related note, MailFrontier's anti-Spam software seems to offer a unique proposed solution (tailored only to Outlook clients).

Guess I can't go back in this blog and create posts.

Well, here's one I had originally slated for Dec. 21st of 2002:

Saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with my brothers. I had to admit, on the technical level, it was very good, but one flaw (and this matter probably resides with Tolkien's work): too many battle scenes. The Ents were just killer, though (those who've seen it will know to what I'm referring). Especially the Ent whose head was on fire, and doused it in the flood.

Sometime from the 22nd - 25th, we saw Star Trek: Nemesis. I fell asleep through the larger portion of the 1st half (yes, it was that compelling). While it had a good premise, the execution was flawed, and used tired conventions to finish the story. You'll note that Brent Spiner was credited as having co-written the story, which should help explain matters.

I've been engrossed in The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (who writes this material from painful teenage experiences of her own). It really is that good. At least so far, which is 56 pages into the 288 pages that follow.

The book is sad, uplifting, dark, and funny, imbued with such grace that it begs to be experienced.

Here's an interview with her about the book.

Tivo's modifications to Linux can be found here.