Month: August 2006

Sorry for all the comment spam, folks. I upgraded my Drupal to the latest version, and forgot a couple of custom patches.

Not to worry, I’m remedying it right now. I caught it in time, but had to disable anonymous posting entirely until the patch is done.

–Matt B.

Bandbox.com, perhaps?

I love spammers… I love spammers chocking on their own vomit. I love spammers being audited by the IRS. I love spammers getting incurable STDs. I love spammers finding the SO cheating with their best friends.

/end rant

My $.02 Weed

Some people are like slinkies, They don’t really have a purpose, But they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs…

:p

After googling for the solution profusively, and trying various recipes over the last few months, I finally figured out the most straightforward — and simple — solution to registering a Linux box on a Windows 2K or Windows 2003 Dynamic DNS server.

On my Ubuntu box, it was this simple: 1. As root, open /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf using your favorite text editor. 2. Add the following lines to the configuration file, where “MYHOSTNAME” is the name of your machine as you wish it to appear in DNS:

send fqdn.fqdn “MYHOSTNAME”; send fqdn.encoded off; send fqdn.server-update on; do-forward-updates;

3. Save and close the file. 4. Restart networking; on my ubuntu box, it was “/etc/init.d/networking restart”.

Voila! Just nslookup your hostname, using the Windows 2000 or 2003 server as your DNS server which you registered on with DDNS, and your host will appear within whatever domain is configured on that server.

(Note: If your DDNS server is configured to only accept GSS-TSIG updates, this won’t work. Have your domain admin allow RFC-compliant updates; it’s just a check-box in the DNS server configuration dialogs.)

All I gotta say is that chick did it live. Dude. I’m floored, that rocked!

http://www.myspace.com/weirdal

That’s all I have to say about that. Go and buy the CD right now just like you know you should!

Yeah, as Matt knows, there’s a new addition here.. http://www.timpane.com/liam

There’s alot to tell.. but I need to go burp him!! Liam Timpane is here to rule the world.

Given that it’s Sunday, and I’m sitting at home in sweatpants after having just woken up while the rest of the family got dolled up and went to church, Robert Kirby’s latest column seems appropriate (click the link for the full article, it’s short and entertaining):

Two weeks ago, a kid got up in church and announced to the ward, “I’d like to bear my tithing.”

He meant to say, of course, that he would like to bear his testimony. But it’s such a small LDS gospel distinction that nobody bothered to call him on it. …

…I think it’s a bit disingenuous to push kids to say they know something when they don’t. It’s OK to encourage them toward public gratitude and the like, but I wonder about the efficacy of insisting that a kid be truthful everywhere but in church.

If you’re going to fib in church, I think you should wait until at least you know what you’re doing.

I just wrote this in response to a friend’s post on LiveJournal regarding Israel. It was a random musing of sorts, but I thought it would be interesting to throw it out here.

By all means, please tear this apart. 🙂 It’s more of a brain dropping than an absolute, calculated belief.

————————

The fact is, terrorist cells and organizations, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to wipe out completely. They’re like a virus (Mr. Anderson); their ability to replicate and stay out of sight is impressive, and it’s very hard to attack them without doing severe damage to the body they inhabit. In this case, Lebanon.

Furthermore, their heirarchy is so spread out that you cannot behead the dragon. Nor can you capture your opponent’s major supply centers or invade their country. Again, they are too diverse.

So it follows, therefore, that if we cannot achieve victory through defeating their leaders, conquering their territory, or even annihilating them completely, we must adopt a new way to win.

So, flying in the face of all conventional military thought (which has gotten us nowhere with this new enemy), I propose we must fight an almost purely defensive battle. We don’t outsmart them, we don’t outmaneuver them. We simply outlast them. There’s an old Irish saying that in war, it’s not those who can inflict the most, it’s those who can suffer the most that emerge victorious. And we can take a lot more than they can, if we only would realize it.

Because we’re big (I’m speaking mostly of America here, but it applies on a lesser level to Israel as well, so long as Israel maintains its friendships with big countries). We’re very big. And we can take a hell of a lot more than they’ve been dishing out so far. Looked at from a purely statistical standpoint, September 11th was barely a scratch on the surface of America’s numbers and strength. Al-Qaeda’s best minds spent years of preparation and planning, consumed a large amount of resources throwing themselves into a concerted attack, and a few years later we find that Nature, acting in her normal completely random way, can dwarf their best efforts when it comes to devastation. Al-Qaeda did not hurt us that deeply on September 11th. What ended up screwing us over was that we overreacted.

Our problem is that as a country we’re still pursuing the myth of perfect safety. But so long as we accept that the occasional attack, no matter how hard we try to safeguard against it, is an inevitability, and learn to live with them, then we remove the “terror” from the equation. Once we start expecting them, they stop taking us by surprise, and we can both prepare and budget for them. Storing up grain against the inevitable bad harvest, if you will. Terrorist threats are then no longer the boogeyman, the horrible possibility that keeps us up at night, but become instead(at least in the national consciousness) a frustration, an annoyance. On an individual level it’s no less heartwrenching to those who are affected by the strikes, but from the perspective of a community or a nation they can be thought of as minor inconveniences. And in so thinking we say to our enemies: “We will be here long, long after time has taken its toll on you.”

Terrorist groups have hardly ever lasted for even a generation, as evil always finds a way to turn upon itself. A strong nation lasts for centuries.

Also, taking this stance frees up a ton of resources that were previously wasted attacking targets that vanished as soon as we arrived and left us no safer than before. And those resources can be put to tremendous humanitarian use. A group based out of Rome analyzed what could have been done with the money that we’ve thrown at Iraq in the past few years – hundreds of billions of dollars – and determined that such money would have been sufficient to bring clean water to every single person on the globe. Every town, every village, every camp.

That’s obviously an extreme example, but if we start implementing programs even a fraction as large, over time the terrorist recruiters will find their pool drying up quickly. Violent religious fervor *thrives* on poverty. Improve your average person’s lot in life, and they’ll be less likely to turn desperate and angry.

So that’s my plan for long-term victory.

Of course, there’s one tiny little thing that throws a wrench in this entire argument: the atom. Or, more precisely, the fact that it can be split.

OK, I know you’ve probably heard of World of Warcraft. It’s the single most popular massively-multiplayer online role-playing game ever made. With over 5 million subscribers, it’s simply… massive. There is no other way to describe it, and the high-level game is all about players vs. players.

I uploaded a copy of this video “Big Blue Dress” to my server. Hope you get a kick out of it.

http://barnson.org/matthew/media/BigBlueDress.wmv WARNING: 50 megabyte file! This may take a few minutes to download on a high-speed connection, and about 3 hours on dialup!

Here are the lyrics as I could transcribe them:

I’ve been kickin’ ass since the dawn of time. I’m just a killing man that’s reached my killing prime.

I burn and I plunder as it suits my desire. The weapon of my choice is great balls of fire.

(Chorus) So why, I ask — this doesn’t make much sense — that a man of my stature should have to wear a dress?

I mean, what, may I inquire were you thinking on that day when you conjured up for a man like me a robe that looks so gay?

Ahh… Say bye-bye and your troubles melt away. Ahh… He uses fire but his robe looks so gay. (End Chorus)

I was taught my craft at the dawn of pain. You may not like my methods but you’ll surely know my name.

I just think incendiary thoughts and my hands burst into flames. A few moments later, and you’ll never be the same.

(Chorus)

(Instrumental Solo)

So if you’re embarassed and you hang your head in shame, and you’d like an opportunity to redeem your worthy name,

well just remember this when next you look to kill that a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in twill!

(Chorus)