GlitchNYC.com

The HP3 Buzz Picks Up

Well, it looks like the general critics (not just the J. K. Rowling fans) are getting behind the new Harry Potter movie.

I've long been a extoller of the fact that the Potter books aren't simply about magic and mystery. These are books about dealing with all the human feelings and tendencies we wrestle with - loneliness, anger, selfishness, and power - while trying to become a good and just person in spite of the not-so-good things you're feeling. Magic in Rowling's world is in many ways a tangible expression of those internal battles each of us face.

Harry's eventual acceptance of all aspects of his personality, good and bad, is the one over-arching theme of her books from the sorting-hat scene in book 1 on. It seems that the new director, Alfonso Cuaron, has zeroed in on the human story within the magic, and his movie may put the Potter films on the map for audiences well outside of Rowling's devoted readership.

Check out the first (NDA breaking?) review online here or check out The Leaky Cauldron for lots more daily news updates.

1:39 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

HowTo: Close Tabs in Firefox with a Middle Click on Linux

This simple little fix saved me a lot of headaches on Linux.

When using Firefox on windows, you open an close tabs with a simple middle click. Once you try it, you'll never go back to regular browsing again.

On Linux, Firefox inherits the default "middleclick" action from the desktop environment for all actions. When you middle-click on the tabs, instead of closing, the "contentLoadURL" action is invoked, causing mild chaos.

To make Firefox behave like it does on Win32, simply go to the advanced options page by entering "about:config" in the URL bar in Firefox.

You'll see more options than you know what to do with. Don't panic. Simply type "middle" in the "Filter" bar under your tabs. Now change middleclick.contentLoadURL to false.

That's it. The tabs should now work just as they do on Windows, closing when you middle click on them, and making your life easy!.

12:36 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Fedora Core 2: Works for me

Many people are bashing Fedora Core 2 (the newest bastard stepchild of Red Hat 9) for having some pretty grievous errors for a full release.

As was the case with Windows ME (hey, it worked great when it didn't break! In fact, it's still running perfectly on some older machines under my watch) I'm going to go against the majority here and sing the praises of this little "community" effort.

See more ...

12:22 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Incoming From Google! Angry Water Slide Owners.

Over the last week, my logs have shown an influx of hundreds of people from google.com researching the Six Flags Banzai Falls Water Slide and coming across my pithy article. It appears the oversized inflatable Slip N' Slide is showing signs of suckage, and random net-dwellers are flocking here to see what I had to say about it.

Poster Lisa Cox writes:

I have had to replace the Banzai waterslide twice now. The 1st time was for a minor hole. The 2nd was a dangerous blowout that my 9 yr. old had when she went down the slide and hit the bottom of the slide. The whole bottom blew out and deflated the slide while my 4 yr. old was waiting at the top! This slide needs to be 3-4 ft. longer at the bottom and needs to be put together a little better than a string of single line stictches. The force that you come down the slide with can only withstand so much! Now I have very upset children and no slide!

Not quite the "older kids with pointy sticks" I predicted, but it appears that this overpriced fun-nugget is causing quite a stir. Any other googlers have similar problems? Perhaps the slide is due for a recall.

12:52 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 4 writebacks |

Setting Up a Staging Site for Blosxom

I use the Blosxom blog-engine here at GlitchNYC both for its simplicity and its flexibilty.

The core system is super-simple: just put a file in a directory (say for example ~/blog/politics/) and it will show up on your front page. Eventually, it will get pushed down the page by newer articles, but is still accessible by topic (in the example above, the article was in the politics directory - that also becomes its category online). You can also access old articles by month or year, going back through the archives using the calendar plugin which you can see on my site.

In the wake of the recent Movable Type price hikes, I'm glad to be using an open source system, and I love being able to tweak the innards of blosxom myself.

Recently, I was griping about the fact that I will often post an article filled with typos, broken links, and missing images, simply because I can't see the article until I make it live. It turns out that Blosxom is so simple I only had to make a few minor changes to set up a little staging site.

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12:08 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Support FireFox

My inner geek is screaming out the need to buy this shirt. My love for FireFox is multifaceted.

First, I love the fact that it's open source.

Second, I love the fact that it kicks the Microsoft equivalent, Internet Explorer's, ass. How did I ever live without tabbed browsing?

Finally, I think the artwork, both in the default theme for FireFox and in this logo, are both slick and superb.

If only the logo was just a tad smaller, I would already own this shirt, and I'd be showing my support all over Manhattan.

Watch as my sensible self and inner-geek do battle! Will I buy the shirt out of support, or will I make a donation and spare my wardrobe.

11:37 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Ten Kay Commotion

Lots to write about as I've largely taken the last week off due to Jon's visit from California but work beckons so it will have to wait. In the mean time, feast your eyes on this (no so) little webcomic The 10k Commotion.com

I started reading this back when it was just starting up, and decided to check on it today - it's moving along quite nicely. The art is slick enough to be very readable, and the original watercolor style is as easy on the eyes as it is practical.

The comic itself follows various teams of DDR players as they posture, play mind games, and eventually compete for $10,000 in an all out DDR championship.

It's funny to see how this game is finally taking the US by storm as it did in Hong Kong years ago when Kurosh brought us over the first set of pads and the HK Silver of DDR1 for playstaion. I spent a few years of my life with seriously over-developed calves due to that game!

1:07 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Double Posted

Arg - my site is syndicated on LiveJournal through a "feed" and gets picked up roughly once an our. This generally leaves me a window to throw a piece up, edit it, and have the edited, complete version be the one that gets aggregated.

Tonight, I got smited by the gods of fate, and my Mame piece went out to the Friends lists without pictures, with typos, and will now be double posted when the aggregator hits my site again. Grrr. I need to set up a "Staging" site where I test out articles before they go live.

10:11 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 1 writebacks |

Nostalgia Gaming

Joust - Donkey Kong - Pac Man - Centipede - Galaga - Bad Dudes - Street Figher. These were the games that defined our youth, played endlessly in arcades and pizza shops while we waited for the adults to do whatever it was they did, on our Colecovisions and our Atari twenty-six and fifty-two hundreds.

I've grown out of videogames. In all honestly, I haven't sat down and played an entire game by myself since beating the crap out of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night over 6 years ago. Sure, I've had little affairs with games since, but they're always been too fast and un-centered, for lack of a better word, for me to enjoy. Games with a 3D camera make me alternately frustrated and dizzy, and it's near to impossible to find a game without one anymore. I don't really care how realistic the lighting or the bump-mapping looks, beyond a geeky curiosity, and I don't need a Hollywood budget or plot. To me, the best games are the ones that, in the words of my "Othello" box, take a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master.

To find the games that I really enjoyed playing for any amount of time, it was time to stop waiting for the next great first person shooter, and start looking backward.

See more ...

9:59 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

Conspiracy Proof 2: Report: Rumsfeld approved operation that led to Iraqi prisoner abuse

Two major indications in one day point to the now all-too-real possibility that my conspiracy theory was anything but crackpot.

I just saw this on the front of google news - Report: Rumsfeld approved operation that led to Iraqi prisoner abuse

The New Yorker will run this story MONDAY - two days from now.

Read the theory. It's suddenly not that off the wall.

10:53 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Conspiracy Proof 1: Powell: If asked, U.S. will leave Iraq

Well, 3 days after posting my conspiracy theory, history has taken a MAJOR step in the direction I suggested in the piece.

From the Washington Post: Colin Powell "said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after June 30, they would pack up without protest, but emphasized he doubted such a request would be made"

Read the rest of the article here

If you haven't read my theory/story yet, give it a look. This gets creepier by the day. What do you think - am I off my rocker, or is it more likely than it seems?

12:28 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Pathetic Geek Stories

I just read through a funny and poignant webcomic chronicling the trouble with growing up as a geek. The cartoonist draws from her own experiences as a basis for the tone of the comics, but each individual comic is taken from a story submitted by the readers. She's been doing it for over 10 years. Some of these ring really true.

PatheticGeekStories.com

Stolen from 8bitJoystick.com, another site which has made my daily-read list.

11:59 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

(Alternate?) Bush Reality

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I've been watching this one brew for almost a year and a half, and it's time to put pen to paper and get it down so that when it comes to pass (as keeps continuing to do) I can say "see, I'm not crazy" and have proof.

Well, maybe not proof, but at least other people will have shared my crazy notions with me.

What follows is, as far as I know, an entirely fictional work based upon current events and the possible actions which led up to them. Let's hope I'm wrong and it stays that way.

July 25, 2003

XXXXXXXXXX Golf Course, XXXXXXX, FL

"So, you're telling me..." The President begins, as he lines up his shot. He's deep in the rough of the 3rd hole. "What you're saying to me is that..." SssshWHACK! The President hacks down a chunk of grass and sends his ball popping back up onto the fairway. "Is that there's absolutely no way out." The President hands his club to his man, taking a towel. He looks towards the high sun, and wipes his sweat covered brow. "I tell ya, I don't know how Jeb does it. Too damn humid for me... 4 Iron" He says, taking the club as it is offered by his assistant and walking towards his ball, away from a very severe looking Donald Rumsfeld.

"What I'm saying, Mr. President, is that we have a problem"

"Well no shit we have a problem - that's what this whole mess is about." The President says, stopping his game for a moment and leaning his weight on the top of his 4 iron. He looks Rumsfeld straight in the eye. "Let's go through this again, piece by piece. We've got to be missing something."

See more ...

2:45 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Troubleshooting Linux: Don't forget the obvious

Well I've been pulling my hair out for the past week or so trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my little MythTV DVR box. I've been getting more and more crashes lately, which I assumed was due to some package incompatibility caused by my incessant "apt-get dist-upgrade" commands that I've been throwing at it in an attempt to keep current. I'd also had the misfortune of allowing my primary HD to fill up while installing packages, which may have corrupted my RPM database.

Last weekend, I did a full fsck (file system check) to make sure the HD was good. Everything checked out OK. Preparing for the worst, I dumped my mysql database out to the HD as an SQL file - or at least, I tried to.

Segmentation fault

See more ...

12:16 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Super Size Me

What would make a grown, intelligent New Yorker with a vegan girlfriend eat McDonalds 3 meals a day, every day, for a month?

A great movie concept, that's what.

Morgan Spurlock, the producer, director, and star of the new independent film, Super Size Me went through that exact ordeal to make a point, and boy, And by the end of the movie, with three doctors and a nutritionist who were originally optimistic about the project telling him to cut it the hell out, does he ever make one.

What seems at first to be nothing more than a documentary based on ideas like those at TheSpark.com turns out to be a poignant, funny epic that makes some very good points.

See more ...

1:38 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

If A. N. Roquelaure Re-Wrote the Wizard of Oz

If A. N. Roquelaure had chosen Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz," which is itself a rather dark tale in its original (non-movie) form, rather than Sleeping Beauty, one imagines it would look something like this.

McFarlane's Twisted Land of Oz - a relatively new toy line with accompanying mini-books is obviously NOT your average toy, and is a direct result of The OZ tales falling into the public domain. It almost makes you understand why Disney's lawyers and lobbyists are fighing so hard to keep the mouse from going down the same dark path. Can you imagine Mickey and Minnie McFarlane style? Ew.

I just happened to be reading Baum's original The Wizard of Oz at the moment, and let me tell you, this depiction, while differing in some obvious ways with its overt sexuality, is no darker than the version Baum penned. In Baum's version, the Tinman begins as a man, and is slowly replaced piece by piece as his axe, which was cursed by the Wicked Witch, cuts of each of his limbs in a series of "accidents."

Dorthy and the Cowardly lion are captured and kept as slaves by the Wicked witch while the Tinman and Scarecrow are dashed to pieces by the Flying Monkeys, and the upon entering the Emerald City, green spectacles are locked onto your head, which you cannot remove.

This was some twisted stuff for 1900. I'd actually wager that Baum's writing was more controversial then than these toys are now. The only thing I wish was that I could get my hands on the new Twisted Oz story without buying the toys. Anyone know if it's available online anywhere?

In the meantime, you can read all the original Baum books over at Project Gutenberg

2:31 am | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

How to Force an Fsck on the Next Reboot

Continuing on my current run of Linux Tech pieces:

I recently needed to do a full filesystem check on my MythTV DVR box, as it was behaving strangely. Doing this from the command line is fairly hard, as you have to switch runlevels and then unmount your drives.

It's also almost impossible to do remotely, as SSH will shutdown when you switch to single user mode.

As a solution, you can reboot and force the check as it comes back online. to do this, run the following:

When it comes back up, it should be clean! That is, of course, unless it finds problems and needs user interaction. Then you're SOL. There's got to be a better way to do this.

Stolen from perturb.org

1:22 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Messenger Spam is Evil

Wow, I'm out of touch with every day users. I've been running on properly firewalled network now since the summer of 98' and on Linux for over a year now. Consequently, I completely missed one of the nastyest side effects of having your computer plugged straight into the Internet.

If you've got a WinNT/2k/XP machine and aren't behind a firewall, you'll be barraged by so called "Messenger Spam" which pops up real looking windows message boxes as if they were coming from a system administrator. This is because they use the same exact interface as admins would use inside a private network. Yes, I know this is old news, but I'm just catching now as I work on a friend's PC which is, *gasp*, out on the net without a firewall. (Yes I'll be fixing that too, don't worry.)

The idea is simple, I just can't believe Microsoft left this glaring a hole in their product. You should at least have to be authenticated to the same domain to send a message like this. Ug.

Anyway, the fix is easy - just disable the "messenger" service. (not to be confused with Windows Messenger, which is another ball of wax entirely with it's own bugs and spam). To disable the service, just go into the services console in "Administrative tools" and change the messenger service from "Automatic" to "Disable" and then right click and stop the service.

Oh yeah, while you're at it, you'll probably want to update to keep out nasties like the new sasser worm.

1:52 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Using the screen Command with SSH

I've been using SSH for years to connect to various Linux boxes; first just this web server, now also my home PC and MythTV DVR box.

If you don't have any Linux experience, think of it like this: the Linux command line is much like the DOS box in windows.

You can run all sorts of programs from it, edit files, administer your system, and so on, but it can seem a bit clunky if you don't know what the commands are.

4 years after starting with Linux I'm still learning them because there are literally thousands.

The cool thing is, using SSH I can connect to that command prompt from anywhere on the net. I use Putty on windows (free!), and there's tons of other cool tricks you can do like tunneling ports through firewalls and more, but I won't get into that here.

The only problem is that often when you close that SSH window your session ends and the programs you were running die. If I'm running a long or complicated update, a bittorrent download, or even serving DCC files on IRC using bitchx, I needed a way to connect, start a program and then "disconnect" without shutting my session down.

I could of course use VNC to connect to the GUI on the machine, but this often fires up another session of KDE and I'm still locked out of my main desktop. It's also a bit bandwidth heavy. X0rfb is beginning to fill this gap by allowing you to connect to your desktop "Remote Desktop" style, but it's not really standard and a bit complicated to get working.

Enter screen.

See more ...

1:32 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 3 writebacks |

DangerDame.com Mixes Fantastic Photography with 50's "bad girl" Fashion

Well, they don't make guy's clothes so I'm out of luck, but holy crap if these aren't some of the better designs I've seen mixed with some really awesome photography on a lot of levels.

I know a lot of girls who would kill for some of these duds.

At the moment, the real roots of the site are a bit murky, but from what I can work out, Veronica Varlow is making the designs, appears in most of the artwork, and ships the damn stuff herself, e-bay style.

She also seems to be in the NYC Metro area somewhere, with a 718 number on the site. So here lies the mystery: Who is Veronica Varlow?

It seems she is also involved in the movie Revolver - another project shrouded in secrecy.

Starving artist or the next Bettie Page, just waiting to hit the limelight at the right time? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Arden caught the earlier error where Bettie Page was misplelled "Betty Paige," saying quite humourosly (and correctly) "You, of ALL people, should know that one." That's what I get for trusting google results when looking up spelling!

She also points to the site Bettiepage.com ...for additional insights into the original "Queen of Kink."

1:17 pm | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 0 writebacks |

The Revenge of Joust

In "researching and implementing" (read: goofing off with) Mame for an upcoming article, I discovered Karl Farh's Ridiculously Complete Joust Strategy Page It's a brilliant read and pretty much sums up everything I could say.

It was only later that I realized just how bizarre the world of Joust is. Player 1 is riding a giant ostrich, and player 2 is mounted on a great stork. The enemy jousters are all sitting pretty on big green buzzards. Stone islands appear and disappear in the sky, acting as obstacles one second and cover in the next. Opponents turn into eggs when defeated, which hatch into even more lethal opponents unless picked up. Inspiration? or madness?

Check out Karl's page and relive the old-school glory!

12:23 am | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

The Inflatable Future

Mass producers are realizing that you don't have to use conventional construction everywhere you would expect. Suddenly inflatable pools are all the rage and the Slip N' Slide, deemed too dangerous (after the grisly grass shredding of too many Slip N' Slider's nipples), has been replaced by this:

The Six Flags Banzai Falls Water Slide. Why the crap is everything cooler nowadays. This thing just looks awesome - imagine playing on that when you were 10. Your house would be the coolest one on the street. Until that older kid who's family was too poor (or sensible) to shell out the $250 for one started whacking at it with a pointed stick.

11:39 pm | permalink | /life | 10 writebacks |