fiddle2

2008-08-06 08:29:40

Dear "CyberBob" at WOAI.com,

I subscribe to the WOAI "San Antonio news" RSS feed to get some of my local news, which inexplicably includes the "No Bull Zone"--an anonymously authored conservative opinion blog.

This is a serious journalistic oversight that I'm surprised I need to point out. Anyone who wants to read ignorant ranting of any political nature can subscribe to individual blog feeds separately. It really shouldn't be included with the rest of the reporting from an objective news organization.
more...

2008-07-29 14:32:49

The first sentence of an email I sent at work today regarding the purchase of a NN/g report:

Tracy,
Marcy told me that Nancy asked her to tell me that her supervisor said to ask you about the purchase of a document we're trying to get....

Bureaucracy FTW!!!!11

2008-07-25 10:26:32

It's a class war, stupid

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he's going to "look at entitlement program" waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the "death tax." We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis... well, shit, what can I say? That's what's happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting "entitlement" programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we're not going to have that conversation, because we're going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama's voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Just a touch on the sensationalistic side, and certainly a biased, albeit accurate, essay, this kind of critique will most certainly be ignored by anyone who has influence necessary to correct the outlined problems. The bit about our country's insolvency is particularly urgent, in my opinion, but is currently either ignored or completely unknown to the public in general. It's entirely possible that within my lifetime we'll have a significant number of American economic refugees to other countries as the government moves well into the realm of a working capital deficit (based on the GDP). Seriously! Our GDP is about $13.86 trillion and our current national debt is about $9.53 trillion. Our current debt is damn near 70% of our GDP. That's some scary shit. Meanwhile, people cast votes for national office based on trivialities like stem cell research.

2008-07-22 10:33:16

Dear Parallels,

We've been together for a long time, but I think we both know that inertia is the only thing keeping us going now, and has been for a while. You were really nice at first, and I enjoyed how special you were. You enabled me to do things I hadn't ever been able to do before. At first, I was really excited to have you since you had a great reputation and my friends liked you so much. We were a great couple, but there are some things that novelty can't mask forever, and it's about time we face our differences.
more...

2008-07-22 08:24:36

How not to live long and prosper

Car Flips after Passenger Shoots at Driver; Driver Stabs Passenger
A man is under arrest, after police say he shot at the woman driving the car he was riding in.

(Emphasis added. Dipshit.)

2008-07-19 22:31:09

Recently, I wanted to play a short .aiff file as a little alarm every 15 minutes. On the Mac, however, there isn't a built-in analog to the play command that ships with most Linux distros. I did a quick search and came up mostly empty, except for a little app called PlayBufferedSoundFile written by Kurt Revis, an apple engineer, intended as a code example for using CoreAudio. Unfortunately, the API has changed such that the technique used in the code example is deprecated, and the code doesn't even compile anymore.

Fortunately, Kurt turned me on to a code example that's included with the new version of Xcode that does exactly this.

The dev tools come with sample code for a tool called "afplay" that can probably do what you want.
Open this in Xcode:
/Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/AudioFileTools.xcodeproj
Build the "afplay" target and there you go.

"There you go" indeed. Thanks, Kurt.

2008-07-17 12:39:02

I was installing Zend Platform on our development server today, and got an error for which I couldn't find very much information.

Our development server's configuration matches our production server's config as much as possible (as it should), and I've locked down our production server pretty hard, which includes a disable_functions directive of "dl, shell_exec, exec, system, passthru, popen" in php.ini in order to prevent PHP scripts from running external executables or making system calls.

Evidently this doesn't jive well with Zend Platform, but there's no documentation about why.

So, for the benefit of the intarwebs, the following functions are not to be included in the disable_functions directive if you wish to use Zend Platform:

• shell_exec
• exec
• popen

The other directives I was using are apparently okay (not that Zend bothers to mention it anywhere).

2008-07-15 13:59:07

Microsoft's Ballmer Opens Up to Partners

Will we encourage people who want to do open-source development to do it on top of Windows? Yes, we're proud that the best PHP system in the world is actually the one that runs on Windows today, not the one that runs on Linux.

WTF is he talking about?

No, really; I can't at all figure out what he's talking about. I don't really know what would constitute a "PHP system", and I certainly can't offhand guess what the "best [one] in the world" is.

2008-07-11 10:40:41

The Baby Butler hands free bottle holder
Good idea. But I liked it better the first time I saw it... when it was called "Boobs."