Obsolete Your Idols

I really like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. It's much more fun than being at work. Really, that's about all I've got to say right now. Ask me again when I like computers again because I don't have to work with Windows all day every day.

Because having to administrate Windows makes me think I hate computers.

Relegated to its own page, it's my list of bookmarks, sporadically updated.

• Friends.
  • christ
  • courtney & roy
  • crag
  • david & brina
  • doug + kari show
  • doug solo action
  • hulk
  • james + robyn
  • keef
  • laws
  • mike
  • morris
  • pg
  • qrs
  • stormagnet
  • sonia
  • tv's spatch
  • will
  • xantha
• Family.
  • nowthis
• Software.
  • aegis
  • amphetadesk
  • bbs100
  • debian project
  • driftnet
  • dropload
  • erasmatazz
  • freebios
  • gamasutra
  • gnu
  • grub the web index
  • honeynet
  • kernel janitors
  • kernel newbies
  • kernel traffic
  • linux-tiny
  • lazyweb
  • linux kernel
  • linux from scratch
  • linuxbios
  • metasploit
  • mon
  • openbios
  • paketto keiretsu
  • perl
  • publicfile
  • shellcode on lj
  • sleuthkit
  • stealth
  • sweetcode
  • systemrescuecd
  • tiara
  • unofficial apt-get sources
• Strangers.
  • aj
  • andyo
  • pied.nu/banned
  • belle de jour
  • blogrunner
  • boingboing
  • bruce sterling
  • centennial society
  • cool tools
  • dave dittrich
  • decafbad
  • delicious
  • die puny humans
  • eat drink make do
  • evan
  • 43 folders
  • linuxchix
  • magic times
  • magnatune
  • memepool
  • memory hole
  • metafilter
  • neural surfer
  • occam's razor
  • raelity bytes
  • reactor core
  • remixfight
  • revland
  • sourcefrog
  • tilman hausherr
• Bedfellows.
  • adbusters
  • air america
  • bartcop
  • calpundit
  • celebrity atheists
  • conscientious consuming
  • counterspin
  • crooked timber
  • cryptome
  • daily howler
  • dailykos
  • detritus
  • economic snapshots
  • eff
  • eschaton
  • greg palast
  • lawrence lessig
  • legitgov actions
  • low impact living
  • mick farren
  • nathan newman
  • negativland
  • no logo
  • opensecrets
  • raw story
  • rightweb
  • robert anton wilson
  • rtmark
  • smoking gun
  • sniggle
  • talking points memo
  • the yes men
  • they rule
  • this modern world
  • uggabugga
  • watching justice
  • whiskey bar
• Comics.
  • bludlines
  • cat town
  • exploding dog
  • howtoons
  • mnftiu
  • modest destiny
  • sinfest
  • a softer world
  • white ninja
• Games.
  • dead inside
    • publisher's site
    • buy it at rpgnow
  • seventh sea
    • all the sites seem to have gone d20
    • i only run 1st edition 7th sea
  • unknown armies
    • official site
    • atlas games
    • cutting room
    • eyeballkid
    • uarchive

Much has happened of late. Forty-five to fifty hours of it each week are work-derived water treading. Here's an effort to condense and clean up some of it and provide an anchor in time.

Unsubscribed to some mailing lists, given simply no time to read them.

• unknown armies
• opie bugs
• opie
• open embedded
• openzaurus users

Started playing around with some of the Social Network Services.

• orkut
• tribe
• mosuki

Spending lots of money, obviously, on crap I don't really need.

• rp games
• cc games

In the free time, a lot of unfinished furniture is getting finished.

A week back I went to the Edinburgh Castle to see Black Ghost because I'd met the people involved through Laws. Their music was enjoyable.

After them, I saw Ned. I wish they'd had CDs to sell, I'd have picked one up. I really liked their sound when I wasn't being concerned that their tower of keyboards and mixing boards were going to collapse in a booze-infused pyre of death. A lot of cables, alcohol, electronics and motion went in to that centerpiece.

Oh, and before those two, [this being part of Club Awexome], I saw Sort of Invisible [sorry, I can't seem to find any sort of site for him], a one-man and computer show. Almost an entire suit of powered armor worth of gear surrounded him to the point that he seemed at risk for being overwhelmed by the machines. Clever songs, though.

I think I sent email to get myself added to the Ned list so I can try to get my hands on a CD, but I can't presently tell.

Belated quick review. I went to the Hotel Utah on July 3 to see Schaffer the Darklord.

There were some opening acts, the most exciting of which for me was BESTFRIENDS, featuring GRBOT and JBOT of Captured! By Robots.

No offense to L'og, I just really like robots. Especially foul-tempered hateful guitar playing robots. So there you have it.

Of the acts, only STD seemed to have merchandise for sale and so I bought the CD. Too busy since then to actually listen to the whole thing and likewise post about it. But based on his live show, you definitely want to buy his album.

I went to my first live rock show as a denizen of the Bay Area at the Hemlock last night. You may remember that some time back [Eight months already? How time flies.] I went to a Replicator show and that was, in fact, the draw again.

Unfortunately, Christopher Bolig was hit by a cab, breaking his arm, so they had to sit this show out. So that left Akimbo and Big Business as the bands on the bill. I knew nothing about either of them but I really needed to rock. Or, at least, drink.

As it turns out, I liked Big Business enough to buy their four-song EP, which I've been listening to on repeat all this morning. I gather they're a Seattle band but I'd never heard [of] them until moving here. It's a small coast, after all.

I accepted a job with ticketweb. In San Francisco.

There will be a period of extensive chaos after which more will be said.

What a fine, fine book store this is.

Patches for making tiny Linux kernels.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"They were used to find the short sides s and diagonals d of triangles with long sides of length l = 1 by the method of completing the square." from Sherlock Holmes in Babylon (and Other Tales of Mathematical History).

UPDATE 2007/12/30: Sourced
Oh, yeah, I got this random demand from here which got it from here.

There's some really zany stuff out there and this is one of my favorites: Cat Town. It's essentially captioned found images of cats in clothes, as near as I can tell, done with the sensibilities you'd expect of tv's Spatch. So go, read, download the musical accompaniments, laugh, love and, then, shop. Or the terrorists will have already won.

You may not know Lois Weisberg. But you probably know someone who does. This article is brain-smashingly amazing. Read the whole thing. Seriously, it's revealing and insightful and inspiring and wonderful.

Relatively recently, I became aware of RPGnow through Atomic Sock Monkey Press's Dead Inside, mentioned repeatedly on the Unknown Armies mailing list.

After poking around for a bit, I went on a buying spree and came out of it extremely pleased with the experience. Some wacky affordable games I would never have otherwise found, some out of print supplements I've missed having around, and a painless purchasing process. You pays your money, they email you some links, you save some files, unzip, and voila. In my case, voila means burn to CD and eyeball to see what might need printing right away to scribble on and jot marginalia.

As basis of comparison, you can find many rare out-of-print gaming things auctioned off on eBay for 4-5x the cost you can find it at RPGnow. If what you're after is the data, not the physical heft, it's a no-brainer. I gather RPGnow also has a division which will sell you hardcopy versions of some of the small-press games and they'll even burn you a CD of the stuff you buy, other than TSR stuff. Many options and lots of goodies you won't feel bad about buying afterwards.

Sock-clad Wiccans.

By way of esr, a project to improve usability of open source software.

UPDATE 2007/12/30: Furthermore
Here is an article by Bruce Tognazzini which has me again thinking about usability of software. Notably, it took me back to the Optimoz project pages, as Mozilla is just about the only thing I do in Linux with the mouse.

There must be a thousand ways to play it.

Oooooh! This, you know, means war.

If you worry about Linux systems being compromised [and you should] go read this article on how to build a forensic toolkit before you need it and how to investigate a running potentially 0wned box with a minimum of disturbance.

UPDATE 2007/12/30: Part the Second

I like Eamon. I've always liked Eamon. You should like Eamon, too.

I've been reading, thinking and playing with design patterns for a while now. This essay is some interesting food for thought about how the point may have been missed.

And here are two resources for writing new rules for SpamAssassin.

An interesting essay on how BSD, especially FreeBSD, compare to Linux. By interesting, I mean, well-reasoned, informative, non-inflammatory. So not a lot of fun to read, though I did regrettably learn things from it.

Internet Linux radio, ogg'ed and creative commons'ed here.

This looks like a pretty nifty tool for unattended system installation, one of my favorite things to work with.

Interesting. I don't know what I'd do with chaosreader but it sounds potentially useful.

As a loyal citizen of Mother Earth, I must warn you that this biography is nothing but the most mendacious lies by an insidious alien intruder hoping to pass as an earthling. Little does the extra-stellar marauder realize that mere earthlings are not chosen for such honors as attending Clarion West.

Have I mentioned how proud I am of the alienne fatale?

Here's a pretty cool webcomic story by someone whose career path gives me the creeps.

Grrr! Pants. Thanks to Prof.Membrane for the pointer and to redshrike for recognizing my jihad.

Santorum. Senator Rick Santorum.

You must go and get these songs. If you only have time to listen to one, listen to this one. I had a couple bucks that I hadn't yet spent on beer so I went and bought access to the GOOD rips of this album at Magnatune and downloaded the WAV tarball and the oggs.

These songs are damned catchy. Overreacting is another fantastic song of subdued fervor. Quality tracks, quirky songs, catchy memespoor. On top of all that, they're absolutely free. He's giving away incredible music. Rock out. Give him some money. Tell everyone you know.

But I just got around to starting the Warren Ellis lj novel.

For Yule Heath gave me a copy of Carcassonne, the Deluxe edition with The River, Cathedrals & Lake-Inns, Pigs and Builders. He and I sat down and played it yesterday and it made for a longer, higher scoring game with more things to remember but still a lot of fun. It'd probably be even more fun with a larger number of players.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is far funnier than I had any right to expect. From the opening short cartoon to the closing credit sequences, this movie tickles several ribs. It's got the mandatory quotable dialogue, the artfully artless acting, the exquisitely overly prolonged shot, which should make this movie a delight for fans of the B movie genre.

Of course, it's obviously deliberately bad and that's just fine. Think of it as hipsters sitting around telling a ghost story inspired by Plan 9 From Outer Space. Or don't think of it as anything at all and just revel in the winking badness.

I could tell you that I believe this to be a fantastic movie. But as a scientist, I believe in nothing.

UPDATE 2007/12/30: Seen Again
I saw it a second time and it was, if possible, even more amusing. Possibly because I knew what to expect of it this time out and so I was able to pay more attention to the nuances of acting and dialogue. Still heartily recommended for dumb fun.

I saw Lost in Translation and it was everything I'd heard it was. I was hooked from the opening title shot right until the end of the scrolling credits [despite a pressing need to rid myself of the previously consumed liter of water and pint of zero carb beverage]. It's a tastefully understated story about a pair of tastefully misunderstood characters. I'm sure it has homages to many famous romances but someone like a film critic will have to bring them to light for you, the review reading masses.

Here's my recommendation to you: do not drag your feet on seeing this film if you haven't. Go. Go with someone you love or go alone. Don't go with some insensitive brute like myself. It's a bittersweet story with a sound-track which almost but not quite distracts. For the first time in my life, this movie caused me to enjoy karaoke. So that's something.

It's got a lot of Japanese in it, so maybe someone who speaks Japanese would find it more or less funny than I did; as a cloddish non-speaker of Japanese, I could identify with the sense of confusion the characters express at the torrent of unknown words and inexplicable directives. I think it's probably rated R because of some breasts seen in a strip bar. I don't know; I've been to strip bars. The strip bar scene here is almost G-ish, by comparison with the reality. But maybe the Rating Board don't get out a lot. Just, you know, close your eyes, if you hate breasts, or are scared of them, or whatever, when you see Bob Harris [Bill Murray] waiting alone in a loud place.

My favorite part of this was Bill Murray's expressiveness, especially in contexts where he was embarrassed. A suitable maturity of the inchagrinable Peter Venkmen of Ghostbusters. This movie could have been improved by cutting the swimming pool scenes so that it would have ended about ten minutes earlier and reading closing credits wouldn't have been a feat of bladder control.

Of the previews I saw, the only one that caught my interest then and there was Monsieur Ibrahim. Omar Sharif! Some young boy! It's like Batman and Robin, without all the fetish wear. Incidentally, a full price ticket is about one hundred fifty percent the cost of a small popcorn and small soda. That has nothing to do with the movie, I just like numbers.

The pundits on the Right are certainly Lazy and quite possibly Insane. Read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, for details. I was horrified and disgusted by the behaviors considered acceptable by the Right and the media but having the medicine in a solution of FrankenHumor made it possible to read and not throw it across the room. No links out of here because it's freakin' early and my eyes won't focus, yet.

In much the same way that Declare reminded me of Cryptonomicon, the book Newton's Cannon by J. Gregory Keyes reminded me of Quicksilver. That is, similar core stories, similar or shared characters and settings, but an overtly fantastical, rather than science-fantasy spin on things.

I rather liked Newton's Cannon a lot [if you know what I mean {and I think you do!}] and would advise anyone grumbling as to the lack of fulfilling pirates in Quicksilver to pick up a copy of Newton's Cannon, rip out chapter 20 from that book, and paste it in to Quicksilver somewhere. Now that's a satisfying pirate dialogue! With Blackbeard! And young Ben Franklin!

Crossing the angles another direction, the familiars of this book remind me quite a bit of the lamia from Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard, which would seem to tie them in to a rather neat triangle of ideas, a perfect Midnight Triangle to sail a 7th Sea campaign through. So that's one good use for this book. I don't feel a compelling urge to read the other two books in this trilogy, but I'm glad I picked this up and read it.

Pretty decent fantasy [tangentially, what is it with Seattle writers and Ben Franklin? Louise Marley's Glass Harmonica is somewhere on my to read pile and that one also features Franklin prominently] with only a slight touch of Jordan's gender-isolation to infuriate me.

I read No Logo and it was depressing and still pertinent. It won't cheer you up to read it. But you might get a better idea how things got the way they are and where they'll go from here. I don't have any solutions. I'm still trying to formulate the questions.

Thinking about distributed revision control systems.

Here are three I'm aware of.

• arch
• darcs
• monotone

Actually, I didn't know anything at all the ones not arch until I read Colin Walters's blog via Planet Debian.

I took a screen shot of bbs100 with ANSI colors in terminus font.

For people who hate colors, here's one in white on black.

Devil pointed me at this collection of early advertising.

Whoa. I know, I'm doubtlessly late to the party on this one, too. Looks like it'd interest me a truckload more than Friendster and their ilk.

I don't have time to keep up on cool stuff, I have a life.

From the Unknown Armies Mailing List: a collection of images and text descriptions of creepy places. Good for Call of Cthulhu or UA, one supposes.

Check this out. Site with some tools about personal data. G'wan. You know you want it.

Here's a project inspired by rubberhose, but aiming at a simpler install of greater usability, named phonebook.

By way of johannes grenzfurthner and thus here, I read about one of those bootable live filesystem CD Linux instances, akin to Knoppix named Dyne:bolic from the folks atDyne who sound quite cool but their homepage is presently unreachable. At least there's a Google cache of dyne.org to look at.

An email on a list I sometimes skim pointed me at this project, which has some interesting stuff tucked away in it.

I had a chance to finally see Evita recently.

I found it confusing [even with helpful explanations provided] and flashy without a lot of substance seemingly to it. The songs are almost catchy, but can't seem to compete with ones from Jesus Christ: Superstar for memespace.

It did inspire me to go dig up some books on Argentina and read them.

Now I've seen the third season of Blackadder. Quite fun. Blackadder as butler to a fool, with some fodder for the lighter side of a 7th Sea campaign.

Episodes:

• Dish & Dishonesty - Parliamentary politics, Blackadder style. Good payoff at the end for the setup.
• Ink & Incapability - This one's got Robbie Coltrane as Dr. Samuel Johnson and also a Shelley and Byron character and is decently funny.
• Nob & Nobility - Totally righteous skewering of several social phenomena: fads, poseurs, gourmet foods, obsession with other cultures. Good 7th Sea fodder, too.
• Sense & Senility - Er, anarchists and actors. This should be more interesting than it was. Maybe I expected too much from it. The ending seemed a bit weak to me.
• Amy & Amiability - Oh boy, Miranda Richardson! Very good 7th Sea fodder. A dashing highwayman or two or one. Some cute sallies at Cyrano de Bergerac. Probably my favorite of this season.
• Duel & Duality - Season ender. No Flasheart. No all fall down. A cute Prince & Pauper reversal. A cute Atkinson - Atkinson dialogue.

All in all, I think I liked season two more but season four less. But that's entirely subjective. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd seen the seasons in a different sequence.

Oh, and it's got the Blackadder Christmas Special on the DVD. That was delightful fun.

Finished reading the second edition of Unknown Armies.

I'm not prepared to do a point-by-point comparison to first edition but it is, in fact, an improvement on every aspect. So if you've held off buying it, stop waiting. Well worth the money to someone running or playing Unknown Armies. From structure to simplification of mechanics to inclusion of first edition supplement material, this is a winner.

Let's see. Social commentary, madcap violence, drugs, prostitution, secrets, schemes, dark shadowy authority and monstering. Yup, it's a Spider Jerusalem collection.

If you like this sort of thing, you'll like it. If you've never read Transmetropolitan, this is not where you want to start. It's a climax of the arc and without context, you'll wonder what is actually going on here to a level which will distract from the story. However, if you've started reading Transmetropolitan and begun to wonder if it's all obtainable to trade paper bound collections, very nearly. There are only six issues not in tpb at this point. So you might as well pick this up when you get the rest of the tpbs.

It's got a number of cackle-worthy gems in it and it's, at worst, fun.

Collecting the StormWatch/WildC.A.T.S. crossover and the end of the second StormWatch series.

Let's see. How to summarize.

Warren Ellis kills a whole bunch of characters. Everybody left goes on to be in The Authority.

There. That's all there is to it. I wasn't interested the first time I read the crossover, never having read WildC.A.T.S. nor particularly getting wood over Aliens, and it wasn't any better in this form, though it was more cost effective, I suppose.

Recommended only for the absolute compleatist or the Alien fetishist. Really not that interesting taken as a work on its own.

Character focused stories for Jack Hawksmoor, Jenny Sparks, Jackson King. That's worth the price of admission. The rest of the book is some more scary background stuff with Rose Tattoo and then a sort of Lovecraft Light bughunt.

Probably worth it for the compleatist but there's nothing here you'll need to read. The Jackson King story is an interesting look at militias from someone who doesn't rub elbows with them.

This collection reads like a bridging sequence, fleshing out characters, winding up to something interesting, which turned out to be the second StormWatch series.

Henry V is pretty darned good.

There's a lot to like here. Branagh really carries off the role, the story is structured [obviously] well, the dialogue is [of course] tight and moving. For people who like Shakespeare, there's nothing here to dislike.

Yes, I do realize everyone has already seen this movie. But I liked it. Shut up.

Courtney pointed me at The Yes Men and they immediately became one of my new favorite reading sites.

Impeach the miserable failure.

Gratuitous google bomb courtesy of my noticing some nitwits trying to bomb Michael Moore with that tag. Tit for tat in this dilemmatic prison.

Here's a set of links as memo to self, pointers to free/open/secure operating system loaders to come back to later when I have time to think about this. The idea being that if you can escape proprietary BIOS in a fashion which allows you to verify security, update when needed, and share with your friends, you'll have a happier, healthier gaggle of systems. This came up recently on the Beowulf list recently tangential to something else and got me started looking for similar/related projects.

• Aegis, secure boot system
• freebios, firmware collection for a BIOS replacement
• linuxbios, replace BIOS with a compressed Linux kernel
• openbios, IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware project
• TIARA (utcboot), Openbios/GRUB/PFORTH composite

I wanted something a little lighter than stow for managing a group of symbolic links. I quite often find myself building an intricate tree of files somewhere on a filesystem and then wanting to be able to combine them in a single directory for some purpose without name collision. This isn't the smartest way to do it, but it saves me from recreating the pipeline one-liner I've been using each time I needed to do this up until now.

#!/bin/bash

# mklinks by Shannon Prickett <binder@manjusri.org>
# Makes unique symbolic links from files under source directory in target directory.
# $Id: mklinks,v 1.1.1.1 2004/01/19 19:30:51 binder Exp $

SRCDIR=$1
DESTDIR=$2

FIND=/usr/bin/find
LN=/bin/ln
READLINK=/bin/readlink

if [ -z "${DESTDIR}" ];
then
    echo "   Usage: $0 <source directory> <target directory>"
    echo "   Create unique symbolic link for each file under <source directory> tree in the [flat] <target directory>."
    exit 1;
else
    IFS=$'\t\n'
    echo "Searching ${SRCDIR} for files."
    for targetfile in `${FIND} ${SRCDIR} -type f` ; do
        targetpath=`dirname ${targetfile}`
        targetprefix=`basename ${targetpath}`
        targetname=`basename ${targetfile}`
        if [ -L ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname} ];
        then
            linkend=`${READLINK} ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}`
            echo "Found link to ${linkend}"
        else
            echo "Linking $targetfile to ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}"
            ${LN} -s ${targetfile} ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}
        fi
    done
    echo "Complete."
fi

Memo to self: Check this source-to-source translator for C out. I'm cCured!

UPDATE 2007/12/30: And Another Thing...
Here's another tool for creating more secure C, Cyclone, from the Death Star.

Here's another one of those notes I leave to myself.

This game engine sounds interesting. Too bad it's a 0.03 release.

So if you love Mozilla like I love Mozilla, you'll have tripped over all sorts of plugin foofarahs as things which should Just Work in fact Don't Work. So Devil pointed me at a page of plugin help for Mozilla on x86 Linux.

If you do something like update your system with reckless abandon often, you may find those tips helpful.

Here's a webpage with some answers to FAQs about being sued by the RIAA.

It's the kind of thing you want to have read before you need it, much like the ACLU reference card about how to handle being arrested by police.

Here's the text of Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet.

Is it just me or does it still seem pertinent?

This seems a misguided but interesting project to be all things to all people in the realm of monitoring systems against intrusion attempts and alerting in response. I'm not sold on the concept but I do like to see new projects, especially ambitious ones.

This is a reminder for myself to go read this paper about P2P impact on a particular network when I have a spare moment.

You could go read it, too, but I haven't read it so I can't tell you if it's worth reading. YMMV.

I think I forgot to mention this when I first read about it, but I read about an improvement on the freenet project [which seems prudent, since when I attempted to run a freenet node, it thrashed my bandwidth and disk nonstop loudly enough that I couldn't sleep or be online on DSL with it present] named Entropy and it seems pretty cool.

I should also probably mention plausibly deniable crypto en passant, rubberhose.

Aw, no one woke me to tell me I could play Neverwinter Nights on Linux, yet.

Scott Kim's site and another collection of puzzles by him. Additionally, here's the Looksmart directory of puzzles.

Further browsing from gamasutra led to a collection of essays on game design which are quite readable.