he-just-cant-get-enough

He Just Can't Get Enough...

Well, look who's back! First, the backstory for those who don't know it.

Now, I post on a website called boards.ie. It has a web design section. I am, as you know, not a (shudders) web designer myself, but I do like to observe, so to speak. There was some inane argument, I don't remember the details, and at some point I noticed that one poster was running PHP on IIS. While not criminal, this is unusual enough to draw comment, if only as a curiosity, and so I did. Resulting in a hissy fit to end all hissy fits. And him saying he was going to the Garda (police) in the morning. Really. Well, he was banned from the forum, I wrote a few rude posts about him here, and he backed down rather quickly. Until now.

One of my posts links to a page on his blog. Quelle Horreur! He has decided, perversely, that this is a copyright violation. After a few months. Yes, copyright. (This is the same boy who slandered me in public before, remember). LINKING to his page. "You can buy the Irish Times in newsagents. Quick, release the lawyers". Remind you of anyone? Now, it has been established at some length that you are allowed link to websites, with the provisio that the website you link to does not advocate doing something illegal. Even then, it is not clear-cut. So, why the new weird hissy fit? Who knows? He still seems to be upset about me saying one of his websites was hideous...

I hadn't been going to play with this one any more, out of a vague feeling of pity, but he's so fun!

Oh, his latest message, sent my way via satellite (he's probably preparing to use a death ray on me), implies that because I know about SQL injection (an essential piece of knowledge for any database programmer, not that I'd consider myself an (ugh) database programmer) that logically means I'll use this to, erm, fire ICBMs at him or something, I'm not sure. I wonder does he do this to lots of people, or has he just got a thing for me?

Hmm, so who is he? He seems to run this thing. He has a hugely confused view of the history of IT. That's about all I know for the moment. Oh, and here's what his nickname means :)

and-now-for-something-complet

And now for something completely different...

Departing from the riveting subject of mad people for the time being, to the sunnier, happier lands of nuclear rockets. I found a nice website on the topic. I'm glad to see I'm not the only Orion Project fan.

technical-issues

Technical Issues

Things are breaking a lot today. My computer woke up with a list of errors along the lines of "/bin/echo: cannot execute binary file". Which is strange; it has been executing the relevant binary files for months now. mount and so on are also dead. I'm taking the poor little thing a boot cd home from college, to see what I can make of it. Separately, our DSL is also dead; it syncs, but can't reach the PPPoE server. Seemingly, this is a known problem, and should be fixed tonight or tomorrow. Some people on the exchange did rather better out of it; they got bumped up to 6mbits/1mbit. And finally, on my way into town, the train did its "I am an elderly electric train and must stop at platform indefinitely and smoke, forcing passengers to wait for next elderly train" act. Grr.

silly-bbc

Silly BBC!

According to the BBC, Blair has pledged to "stand up to democracy in Iraq".

wedding

Wedding

I was at my dad's girlfriend's sister's wedding today. It was an interesting affair, with three ceremonies; a civil registry office marriage, a Muslim blessing by some form of cleric (I heard him referred to as both mullah and imam) and a Catholic blessing by a monk. The Muslim blessing in particular was quite interesting; it was in Arabic, with an explaination of what was going on in English. The Muslim cleric was considerably less scary than they are portrayed on Sky News and such; he didn't look like he blew up trains, even on his day off.

Was quite a fun day :)

jackson

Jackson

Found a copy of that Michael Jackson documentary, the Martin Bashir one. One quote stands out:

(about an electric scooter)
Jackson: Sometimes at night I like to cruise the hotel coridoors in this.
Bashir (with great, Jeeves-like dignity): You ARE joking?

The whole thing is rather unkind.

vatican-uber-alles

Vatican Uber Alles

The Vatican is banning gay priests. Even celibate ones. They're "intrinsically disordered", don't you know. Again, even the ones who voluntarily don't shag men. Mr Ratzinger seems to be making his presence felt.

yet-more-mad-people

Yet More Mad People

Oh, I DO get the craziest people commenting here: http://blog.synnottsoftware.com/2005/09/03/the-great-american-public/

more-stupid-people

More Stupid People

Poll seen on the internet recently: "Will we ever run out of oil?" 20% voted no. Hmm. (Most of them believed that the Earth would produce oil quickly enough to satisfy demand, and that its being a non-renewable resource is a "liberal myth". What's WRONG with these people?)

finished-summer-job

Finished Summer Job

Well, I'm finished my summer job. It was interesting and fun, and I'll miss it. That's all for now.

coolness-2

Coolness

Project Pluto.

A nuclear powered ramjet missile. Designed to run for months, at 513MW. Designed in the period after the Soviet Union had unveiled their R-7 ICBM, but before the Americans had an ICBM.

The R-7, incidentally, was interesting. It was liquid-fueled, needed a huge ground support facility, took 20 hours to fuel and carried a nuclear warhead roughly powerful enough to stun a small kitten. Though of limited practical use (the Soviet Union was hardly going to ask for 20hrs advance warning of nuclear war to fuel the rockets and target appropriate kittens) it was a great propaganda victory. Variants were later used to launch Sputnik and Vostok (the first manned spacecraft) and a variant is currently used for the Russian manned Soyuz programme.

Anyway, by the time the ramjet cruise missile was in testing stages, the US had its own huge, impractical kitten-stunning ICBMs, and had no further need of it. Pity. It had interesting potential.

fun-quote

Fun Quote

(Lord Arran introduced a failed bill to the House of Lords to legalise homosexuality, a few years before the House of Commons legalised it)

In 1973, Lord Arran got a bill to protect badgers enacted. It is said that his patience was tried by the experience; he allegedly remarked to a colleague, "There weren't so many supporting my Badgers' Bill as my Buggers' Bill!" to which another noble lord replied, "No! but then there aren't any badgers in the House of Lords, are there?"

yay

Yay!

Ah, back online :)

heh

*Heh*

Upset at the Millenium Stadium demanding they stop using an image of that stadium, a BNP spokesman said "There is too much sniping at the BNP. We have a lot of support in Wales." So there. (Incidentally, "a lot" seems to be used here as an alias for "not very much at all, really").

more-rockets-and-nuclear

More Rockets and Nuclear

The Russians are developing a $200,000 floating mini-nuclear plant, to be deployed in isolated areas. It can be used for power or desalination. It's being put forward as an alternative to small coal and oil plants. Good to see someone's doing something in this area.

SpaceX, a private rocketry company, is developing a cheap heavy rocket. The largest configuration will be 25 tonnes to LEO, which the company claims is "greater than any other vehicle". While this is strictly speaking true, it is misleading; the all three Energia configurations had greater lift capacity, as did the Saturn V. So, for that matter, do the Space Shuttle rockets, though they are an integral part of the shuttle and can't be used for independant lauches. And by the time the rocket is actually available (2008), planned upgrades to the heavy Ariane V and Proton rockets will have superceded it. Still, if it works as alleged at that cost, it will be VERY cheap. Interestingly, the company claims that the rocket will be man-rated. If this is the case, it could be a viable launch platform for Kliper.

self-esteem

Self-Esteem

(Probably not suitable for human consumption; this is the sort of thing I will regret writing in the morning, I suspect; I don't, however, do revisionism.)

I just discovered today that I have two pairs of jeans that still fit remotely acceptably. The rest are too big, and threaten to fall off. Which is the inconvenient thing about losing weight; need new clothes. Interestingly, the ones that fit are 30" waist, and so is one pair of the fallie-offie ones. The clothing industry really needs to learn to embrace modern measurement technology, or at least talk to the ISO people.

So, what's the weight-loss in aid of? A (probably futile) attempt to feel better about myself. I don't like myself much, really. I'm ugly, not very interesting, socially broken, etc etc. Plus I'm generally paraniod about my weight; I was fat till I was 17, and can't shake the idea that I still am off.

I have serious problems getting guys, due to afore-mentioned ugliness and social broken-ness, and also due to low self-esteem (so I'm told) and low confidence. I generally only get on well with very smart people, and even then often not so well. I obviously could never approach guys myself, and no-one's going to go near me. That leaves friends trying to set me up with people. This has happened a few times, with ludicrous results. One guy was obviously thinking of people he'd be able to get; he tried to set me up with male model (no, really) and a generic tall pretty arts student. Needless to say, those didn't work out. Another friend tried, and then ended up going out with the guy he was trying to set me up with, which was sort of funny. But yes, all this is why I'm perma-single and extremely bitter about it (and also why I should probably start being cautious of cats).

Hmm, I forget what my point was when I started writing this.

eric-s-raymond

Eric S Raymond

I was reading Eric S Raymond's blog today. For those who don't know of Eric, he's an extremely outspoken open-source software advocate. He is also that most rare and terrifying of things, an intelligent libertarian. Though not, thankfully, a crazed bigot. Worth a look.

silence-of-the-suns

Silence of the Suns

Yesterday, when I was in college for an hour, the large room of aging Sun workstations were chattering constantly to each other, a strange, low clicking of SCSI drives, as they were all re-imaged. Today, completely silent; they're switched off. That is all :)

bad-ui-design

Bad UI Design

In Internet Explorer, Opera and recent versions of Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox, hitting backspace goes to the previous page. This seems quite reasonable.

At the moment, I'm sitting at a computer whose only decent browser is Firefox 0.7 (it also has some elderly Mozilla, which suffers from the same problem). To go back to the previous page in Firefox 0.7, at least in Linux, you press ALT-LEFT. Not any old ALT, you understand, the one on the left. Irritatingly, my hand stretches just wide enough to touch the edges of both buttons at once, without being able to press them. Thus I must use two hands. Grr.

the-horrors-of-c

The Horrors of C++

I had occasion to write something in C++ today. This always disturbs me; I feel I am not using as much of the STL as I might be. I worry that someone will look at it and shout "why, he's a C programmer in disguise", and I'll be ostracised. For example, I hand-wrote a basic tokeniser to operate on the STL string class today. Now, I'm sure that if you treat the STL just right, and sacrifice a goat to it, or something, it will tokenise strings for you, but it is certainly non-obvious.

Also, Windows development tools are really, really bad.

the-great-american-public

The Great American Public

I was reading the entry for Marilyn Monroe on IMDB lately. In their list of new forum topics I noticed "They found the reincarnation of Marilyn? wtf?" One of the posts:

I've heard of that. Don't believe a word of it though. Maybe some actress has a tiny resemblance to Marilyn and they want to make it big. What better way to advertise yourself with using a well known actress to be "Reincarnated" into? I heard it takes 300 years for reincarnation anyways.

Happy Birthday Mr. President!

Another:

that's ridiculous, I always thought (and I'm not alone) that when you come back your completely opposite of what you used to be. Whoever is so not, and hasn't been Marilyn Monroe. By the way, I wouldn't trust anyone by the name of Finkelstein anyways.

And another:

I read a book about reincarnation and it said past life regression is pretty much BS.

Eek.

im-not-a-insert-bigot-here-bu

"I'm not a (insert bigot here), BUT"

This person doesn't object to homosexuality, he just thinks it's unnatural and should be kept hidden away. He's writing about how terrible it is that there's the possibility that a gay person (though not a couple) could adopt in this country (which is, in fact, nothing new). Some of the comments are hilarious.

best-quote-ever

Best Quote Ever

See the first sentence.

soylent-cows-are-made-of-peop

Soylent Cows are made of People!

Apparently, the origin of vCJD/BSE may be bone meal from India fed to cows that incorporated human material. Eek.

oath-of-fealty

Oath of Fealty

Oath of Fealty is a rather good book by stark raving mad libertarian science fiction writer Larry Niven. It concerns an affluent city-in-a-building owned by a company (all of the directors of the company are kind, just and charming, naturally. Like most impractical political systems, libertarian corporatism relies on this implicitly.) near LA. City-in-building is scared of scary outside, lots of walls and guards and so on, is attacked, defends itself...

Another Niven book dealing with somewhat similar topics; Earth is hit by large comet; survivors hole up in a half-finished nuclear power plant, while cannibals roam the streets. (Niven was keen on nuclear plants; there were a couple attached to the city-in-a-building, too, by hydogen pipeline. I approve this product and/or service).

The reason I mention this is because of this. directNIC, a webhost in New Orleans, is still operating. Yes, that's right. A webhost. They're apparently down to one line to the outside world (silly people don't have satellite), and they're running on diesel generators; fuel brought in by truck and carted up into their building. They've been sheltering police, and watching the looters, and so on. They have pics here. SomethingAwful.com, hosted by them, is down. It's all rather odd. Wonder how long they'll last?

ugly-people-use-sun

Ugly People use Sun

Have a look at Sun Ireland. Hold your mouse over the thingy about schools on the right. Now hold your mouse over the thing below. That's right! Ugly people use Sun! By contrast, non-descript people use Windows, euphorically happy and/or drugged people use Apple, and people with silly names use Netware.

Must be off; Sun need more people for their ads ;)