In my continuing quest to graph all sorts of useless things, I’m graphing traffic on #apache

Today I received a bill from Domain Registry of America. (I won’t give them the satisfaction of providing a link to their web site, but if you care, it is droa dot com.) It was for the renewal of my domain name, rcbowen.com, which, they claim, is to expire on May 24, 2003. Two things are important here. First, the domain is not scheduled to expire on the stated date. Secondly, it is not registered with, nor has it ever been registered with, this registrar. This tactic is intentionally designed to mislead busy people into thinking that it is merely a bill, missing the fine print, and transferring their domain to these swindlers. Not only are they being unethical, but their prices are outlandish – $25 for a year, $40 for two years.

I encourage you to boycot this den of thieves, and, if you have any domains registered there, to transfer them to Dotster, or any of the other registrars that actually conduct themselves ethically.

2003 And Beyond

I went through the pain of reading the whole darned thing. Now you should too.

I just discovered that my journal was configured to reject trackback pings, which is, presumably, why none of them have shown up, even though I know that I’ve been referenced elsewhere. Now, perhaps, my ego can swell to its intended size.

Did some pair programming this afternoon with Ken, on the Library project for the LPLUG. It really was amazing how much more can be accomplished with two programmers working together than the same two could produce working on their own.

Particular kudos to Schwern for the Test::More module, and particularly for is_deeply, which saved a HUGE amount of time and work on testing.

Also interesting is to see the looks that people give you when you’re pair programming – like they think that you’re just wasting half of your effort. I do know for sure that I always get more actual functional code written when I have someone working with me. Part of it is motivation. Part of it is the fresh ideas. Part of it is the catching of stupid mistakes before they can cause real damage. It’s an interesting synergy.

I picked up a GPS on the way to work this morning, in anticipation of an upcoming trip. The idea was to get something, play with it for a week or two, and then return it.

I am hooked. This is the coolest toy I have every played with, with no exception that I can think of. I’m a little unclear what the appeal is, exactly, but it is very very cool. Real specific, huh?

So, in case you wondered, I’m at 37,51.508N, 84,39.595W, and 883 ft elevation

Oh, by the way, what I got is here, but what I really want is here

As I was watching the mail logs this morning, I realized that a substantial portion of the spam I receive gets dumped by the MTA before it even has a chance to reach my spam filters. Now, I’m not sure if this can really rightly be called spam, but perhaps attempted spam. So, I added these numbers to my spam stats, and it added at least another 20% to the figure. Seems that about 63% of all the email that my mail server receives is rejected. Most of this (apparently about 40%) is dropped specifically because the content identifies it as spam. The remainder is sent to bogus or no-longer-valid email addresses, or is sent from faked addresses. And, even after that, I still get a significant number of junk messages in my inbox every time I check my mail. When will this nonsense end?

Just a followup on playing games under wine. Reader Rabbit plays flawlessly under wine. No complaints at all.

It seems that a lot of kids games these days are written in shockwave or flash, and so there is really no difficulty running them natively under Linux if you can get to the actual .swf file. However, many of them are embedded in .exe files, and so you have to go through the wine layer to get to them.

Anyways, that’s the next thing to try with some of these games that are resisting my efforts.

I’m trying to get “Putt Putt Saves The Zoo” to run under wine on Linux (RedHat 8.0 if it matters). The only use I have for the operating system from Redmond is games. In particular, games for my daughter. When I want to do actual work I use a real operating system. When I want to play, I use a toy operating system. Seems fitting.

I discovered that “Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo” will run under wine, but it is painfully slow. Thinking that it was a problem with my lack of memory, I have added an additional 512M of memory. However, it it all cpu. This game, which is, as far as I can tell, a shockwave or flash thingy, consumes 100% of the cpu, and runs so slow that the 15-second intro sequence takes about 10 minutes.

There’s got to be something that I can do to make this go faster, but I’ve turned off all the other things that I can turn off without shutting down the system, and it has no effect. If anyone has any clues, I’d be glad to hear them. It would be a great shame to have to get Yet Another Computer just so that I can play a few silly games.

Wollabot – A modular service bot for IRC channels written in PHP

Apparently I can’t make this stuff up fast enough to keep ahead of the … um … resourceful gentlemen who are actually doing it.

Please note that my opions regarding PHP IRC bots and eternal damnation have not varied with this discovery.