Tom the Architect thought this picture from the photo album was pretty funny and told me I should throw it on the blog.
So here it is. The caption reads:
Memorial Day weekend is traditionally the most dangerous weekend on the highways, as you can see by this awful picture. Thankfully, no one was injured.
Tagged with: funny, humor, Photos
Finally, The Adventures of Pete & Pete - Season 1 has been released on DVD.
From 1993 - 1996, Nickelodeon aired this series about two brothers named Pete and their adventures in the town of Wellsville. This was the one show that Kelsi would watch when she was small that I looked forward to watching with her. It was the event of our weekends together on Sundays at 11:00a.
The episodes were funny, intelligent, and just fun to watch. A while back we found them on Noggin and began watching them again, wondering when they would finally be released to home video.
This show brings back a lot of great memories. Unfortunately, while Kelsi found them at the mall (we were shopping for eighth grade graduation clothes), we had to take her home before she got a chance to watch them with me this time around.
If you find these in the video store, grab them and give them a try. The show is a crack up and from my perspective probably one of the best situation comedies I’ve ever seen on TV. It also had one of the catchiest theme songs (”Hey Sandy” by Polaris) that I’ve ever heard, which can be found on the album Music From the Adventures of Pete & Pete.
Yesterday Jonna, Kelsi and I went to see House of Wax, the latest horror movie out in the theaters.
Now, normally I’m the type of person that gets really irritated with movies. If there is no plot, or the movie is just plain stupid, I will walk out of the theater pretty annoyed. Horror movies are one of the genres that I will normally rent, because I just can’t see spending the money to be irritated.
However, yesterday we were looking for something to do and this was the only movie that looked remotely interesting to all three of us, so we went.
Believe it or not, I really liked it. Sure there were extremely slow parts, and sure it was a full on slasher movie, but I walked out satisfied with what I got.
The movie revolves around six kids on their way to a football game. They stop for the night in the woods to camp out. When they wake up the next morning one of the cars has the fan belt cut. Two of the people stay behind to get a ride to the nearest town to pick up a fan belt while the rest of the people go off to try and get to the football game.
Unfortunately, the next town over is relatively abandoned. It winds up that there are a couple of psycho brothers in the town that have systematically killed everyone in the town and coated them with wax and set them up as a huge town sized wax museum. As visitors show up, they are added to the collection.
Now, I know this sounds stupid, but it was actually a pretty entertaining movie to watch. You can think of it as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum — and if you approach it this way you’ll have a lot more fun watching it. I actually walked out of there satisfied that I had seen a decent horror movie.
If you like horror movies, you’ll like this one once it gets going. Be prepared for a really slow start though. For a bit, the movie is painfully slow to watch. Once it heats up though, it’s a lot of fun.
Tagged with: movies
As I was browsing through Borders on Saturday I ran across a book called Star Wars And Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine. This book attempts to explain philosophy using the Star Wars movies as a metaphor.
I used to read a lot on philosophy - mostly Zen and Taoism. At one point in time, Kelsi bought me a book called The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer which I really enjoyed. I have also read The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, which attempts to explain eastern philosophy through the Winnie the Pooh characters.
From the titles, one would think that I am just a moron that cannot relate to deep thoughts unless it is illustrated by some childhood cartoon character. However, these books are not for 6 year olds. They really go into quite a bit of depth, while making the concepts more accessible by relating them to characters and situations that are known by everyone. They take what usually is extremely dry reading and make it accessible.
This latest book is extremely interesting, with essays ranging from the discussion as to whether Yoda is a Zen Master or a great warrior, to a discussion over whether cloning is morally wrong, to the discussion of free will vs. predestination.
A sampling of the chapters include:
This book is a pretty interesting read. The book also makes you realize just how much thought went into the stories as you see the characters and concepts such as “The Force” related to eastern philosophy and ideas. If you see it at the store (or Amazon) and have a couple of days to kill, pick it up.
I recently picked up Web Designer’s Reference : An Integrated Approach to Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Craig Grannell after seeing a reference to it on Slashdot. I have realized since starting to work with Wordpress that I am a little behind on things like CSS and XHTML and had to get up to date, since most of the themes and styles looked like greek to me and I had a hard time modifying them - because I didn’t know what they meant.
The book is really well written. It takes you through not only the mechanics of CSS but takes you through step by step examples that you can walk through to get some hands on experience, something I really need when learning something new.
Now that I know a little more about CSS, I don’t think I’ll ever look at web page design the same way again. I’m one of those people whose markup abilities were kind of stuck in the 90’s because of the lack of consistent CSS support across browsers when CSS was first coming out. I figured if it didn’t work consistently everywhere, I might as well wait until it does. It just so happened I waited for what now seems like forever. I had no idea that CSS had gotten so powerful.
Some of the areas Craig covers in his book include:
Craig also includes an XHTML reference, a web color reference, an entities reference, and a CSS reference towards the end of the book.
From an XHTML perspective, Craig covers a lot of the features related to accessibility, which wound up really interesting to me as well. I learned a lot from these sections.
If you are like me, and blew off even looking at CSS until now, this is definitely the book for you. It’s an easy read for those of us who haven’t been paying attention to this aspect of software development and includes great examples to walk you through the power of decoupling display from your mark up.
I now have enough detail to know where I need to head next and some practical experience with the examples to understand the basic concepts. Sometimes that’s all you need.
I’ve just spent a couple of days trying to get Subversion to build on a Solaris 9 environment. For some reason, it wasn’t as easy as it has been in the past and I’ve had a boat load of trouble, so I wanted to document the final solution I came to.
We are running Solaris 9 and access the Subversion repository via HTTP/HTTPS through Apache. This means that I have to compile in SSL support for the client, in addition to mod_svn_dav support for the Apache Server. We also use the mod_svn_authz module for access control to the repository.
The following software is installed on the system:
The normal process I use for building these components is the following:
./configure --with-ssl --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB4.2 --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs make
The software builds until it hits the neon module, after which I would receive pages of the following errors:
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/subversion-1.2.0/neon'
cd src && make
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/subversion-1.2.0/neon/src'
/bin/bash ../libtool --quiet --mode=link gcc -rpath /usr/local/lib
-version-info 24:7:0
-o libneon.la ne_request.lo ne_session.lo ne_basic.lo ne_string.lo ne_uri.lo
ne_dates.lo ne_alloc.lo ne_md5.lo ne_utils.lo ne_socket.lo ne_auth.lo
ne_cookies.lo ne_redirect.lo ne_compress.lo ne_207.lo ne_xml.lo
ne_props.lo ne_locks.lo ne_acl.lo
ne_openssl.lo -lssl -lcrypto -lnsl -lsocket
-lz /tmp/subversion-1.2.0/apr-util/xml/expat/lib/libexpat.la
Text relocation remains referenced
against symbol offset in file
<unknown> 0xd44 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd48 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd4c /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd50 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd54 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd58 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd5c /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd60 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd64 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<unknown> 0xd68 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
<snip remaining 3 pages of errors>
When I saw the errors streaming across the screen, I remembered that I had gotten them before. To fix them previously, I changed into the neon directory and typed the following:
./configure --with-ssl --disable-shared
This had previously fixed the problem (I have no idea why). This time it didn’t and after rebuilding I had the same results.
On a fluke, I decided to run the autogen.sh shell script file in the neon directory and reconfigure neon, enabling shared libraries. Then I went back up to the root of the tree and built again. This time the software built cleanly and all tests ran successfully.
Since I finally had a clean build and all tests had ran successfully, I decided to go ahead and install it. Upon installing it I received errors that linking failed on the shared libraries being installed and I had to relink everything. This pretty much rendered my source control unuseable until I could figure out why linking failed. Just to be clear, this was not on the production repository box, but on another Solaris machine.
I went through my /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib directory and removed every libsvn* shared library, all apr and apr-util shared libraries and all neon libraries that were present on the system. Once this completed, I was able to install the software successfully.
One of the symptoms of old libraries in the path or linking errors is the ‘undefined symbol’ error some have reported on the mailing list when upgrading. When you run into an error like this, you might want to try finding and removing all of these libraries as stated above, as this is an error I was getting as well. Removing the old directories and running make install fixed the problem.
This install was pretty painful. I attribute most of the pain to the fact that I was doing most of this work between meetings, so the constant start / stop took a toll on entering “flow state” to really think about the problem. As I was experiencing these problems, I couldn’t find any really good write ups on installation of the Subversion software on Solaris, so I figured I’d throw this together in the event that someone else was experiencing this level of frustration. Plus, I figure it will help me next time I need to do this to have an actual documented process to follow.
A summary of what I did follows, for those who don’t want to wade through this whole post again:
On the bright side, I also upgraded a SuSE 9.1 box to the new software. This took about five minutes after I found these RPM packages for SuSE 9.1.
Tagged with: building, install, solaris, Subversion
The much anticipated release of Subversion 1.2 is here. This version includes many changes, including the support for file locking and full autoversioning (WebDAV/Web Folders) support in addition to many performance improvements and Ruby bindings to name a few.
A full list of changes are available in the release notes.
Downloads are available from the download area.
Tagged with: announcements, Subversion
We went to see Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith yesterday afternoon and I have to agree with many of the reviews out there - this is the best Star Wars movie to date. George Lucas has definitely ended with a masterpiece.
The movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long, but you are so involved you don’t notice it. This is the part of the story you have always wanted to see. What happened to the Jedi’s? How did the emperor come into power? How did he turn Anakin to the dark side? The answers to all of these questions are finally here.
Earlier in the week I had read Jason Kottke’s review of the movie. One of the things he mentioned was that as he walked out of the movie he felt sadness for Darth Vader — that Lucas had made him into a sympathetic character rather than the evil character you find in the first three movies. I wondered how that could be, but after seeing the movie I understood. It really is a tragic story.
I spent a lot of time once we left the theater thinking about this movie. What made it so good? Was it really that good of a story, or is it really that we’ve waited 28 years for the answers to many of the questions that the movie finally answers? Is it the story, or is it the closure we all get when we finally have the full background behind the first trilogy?
I think the answer is both. The story is great, but as I talked to the boys about it yesterday, one of the phrases that kept creeping into my mind was that the “circle was finally closed”. We finally have all of the answers about Darth Vader, Luke and Leia, and the Jedi Council. We finally know everything about the mythological world that Lucas introduced to us in 1977.
The story is complete and we finally, after 28 years, have closure.
Now, while the movie absolutely impressed me, the people around me did not. At a movie of this magnitude, I am still surprised at how rude people can be.
Here’s some advice for those going to the movies in the future:
Aside from all of this, this really was the best movie I have seen in a long time. I highly recommend it and cannot wait until it comes out on DVD so that I can watch it again.
Related Articles:
Some links on Movie Etiquette:
I, of course, made them take pictures of the rabbits they were able to round up before they set them free in out in the brush in the back yard (per the advice of Animal Control). Now, enough of that. We’re off to Revenge of the Sith.
An update is available to Wordpress 1.5.1. The text from the release page follows:
In our effort to optimize we made two mistakes in 1.5.1, one related to feeds and one related to trackbacks and pingbacks. We’ve updated the download with 1.5.1.1 which corrects these bugs and a few others.
If you are having trouble with RSS feeds or track/pingbacks, this update is for you.
If you’ve made changes to the existing codebase for your site, the following files were effected, so back them up so you have access to your changes.
wordpress/wp-admin/post.php
wordpress/wp-admin/quicktags.js
wordpress/wp-blog-header.php
wordpress/wp-comments-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/functions-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php
wordpress/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-category.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/version.php
wordpress/wp-includes/wp-db.php
wordpress/xmlrpc.php
Those who use the AuthImage plugin will want to back up wp-comments-post.php.
I received an invitation to the Beta of Google Mail from Tom the Architect a few weeks ago and finally over the last couple of days decided to activate my account. I really like the service. As a matter of fact, I like it so much I’ve configured my main account to forward all mail over to it and it has become my primary mail application, even though I tend to have control issues around things having to run in my house.
The user interface is great. Of course the first thing you will want to do is create folders in which to organize your mail. Google Mail doesn’t have them. What it uses instead are what they call labels. Labels are essentially the same things as “tags” that you find on sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. While I like the idea of tagging on email, and think its a killer feature, I still miss being able to move things out of the way and just look at stuff that is in my inbox that is not categorized. Since I subscribe to a number of email lists for software like Subversion and CruiseControl, my inbox tends to get a little cluttered. While I can automatically filter email to assign labels based on who its from, who it’s to, and subject content, and can display only those emails with a given tag, I still cannot find a way to view email that has no tag.
The user interface is based almost entirely on Ajax technology, which gives the site a very “thick client” feel, without all of the weight. Your inbox even automatically refreshes every now and again, which at first is quite surprising, and really convenient.
And of course, you get full Google search capabilities for your whole inbox. Enough said.
Google has definitely set the standard for web mail applications with the Beta of Google Mail. I’m extremely impressed. Each time they come up with something, my life is a little more dependent on them. First there was web search, then news groups, then news aggregation, THEN maps and now email.
I can’t wait to see whats next.
Tagged with: google
Just when you thought they would be out of ideas for reality TV, the folks at A&E come up with a show like Intervention, which airs Sunday nights at 9pm Central time.
This show is as addicting as the gambling and drugs its participants are hooked on. Once you start, you can’t stop watching it.
The premise of the show is that the participants volunteer to do a documentary on addiction and the cameras follow them around as they talk about their behavior. The have no idea that the whole point is to get them into a room with their loved ones and push them into rehab.
The most disturbing episode thus far was episode 2, about a 31 year old man named Gabe who was a compulsive gambler. His view on life was that it was his parents “obligation” to pay his debts. These parents mortgaged their house to help pay his $500,000 gambling debts and the guy still wasn’t satisfied. The guy threw nothing short of temper tantrums every time he didn’t get his way. It was the most painful example of someone who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions that I had ever seen. You have to keep an eye out for reruns of this episode. It’s amazingly disturbing.
The only episode I’ve missed so far is the one on video game addiction. I’m keeping my eye out for that one.
Oh, big news. I’ve been asked to participate in a show documentary about blogging. I’ll let you know how that goes …
Browsing through Suncoast Video yesterday, we found that Quantum Leap - The Complete Third Season has been released to DVD.
This show, during the time that it was on, was my absolute favorite on TV. The third season includes the two part “The Leap Home” episodes, where Sam leaps back into himself when he is 16 in part one to win a basketball game. During this time he tries to save his father and brother from dying.
The second part of the episode, Sam leaps into a member of his brothers squad in Viet Nam, where he tries to prevent Toms death on April 8, 1969.
These are the two episodes we got through last night. I’m hoping to keep chipping away at the set through the rest of the week.
We found the set quite a bit cheaper over at Wal-mart, so you might want to check there before hitting the usual channels (unless of course you want to click one of the links above and give me a cut of your purchase). 
I’m continuing to muck about with themes, because I’ve suddenly gotten tired of the way the site looks lately, which can be surprisingly unmotivating. The latest theme is a customized version of Mallow.
The theme is based on Kubrick for Wordpress, but looks much nicer. We’ll see how long I keep this one. One thing I do like about it is the rollover menus at the top, which allows me to put some of the important areas right up top where they can be found easily. The first thing to go up there are the SVK Tutorials, which are getting quite a bit of traffic now that SVK has gone 1.0.
The header image is a subset of a picture of the sun setting over Holland that I found on Flickr. I just thought it looked really cool and worked well with the themes color scheme.
One thing notably missing are the Google Ads. I just can’t find a nice place to put them, so they’re being removed.
Tagged with: Wordpress
Found this article on Slashdot today.
It’s great to see a company the size of an IBM picking FireFox “officially” over IE.
There is a new project (currently in .01 status) called The Dojo Toolkit. From their site, the goal is to “create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers”.
There is also an Introduction to Dojo on the site that explains what they are trying to accomplish.
The project is in it’s really early stages, but it looks interesting.
Also interesting is that this is another project using Trac for their project management software, something I had written a note to myself about previously (3 months ago to be exact), but still haven’t made the time to get it installed.
The Subversion team has announced the release of the third release candidate for the latest version of their version control system.
The software can be downloaded from the download section of the projects web site.
Update:
The Win32 Binaries are also now available.
Tagged with: announcements, Subversion
Chia-liang Kao, author of the SVK source control tool, announced the release of SVK 1.0 final today.
And if that wasn’t enough for you, the Wordpress folks have announced the release of Wordpress 1.5.1. Download it now. Information on what has changed is available in the ChangeLog on the codex.
Update: 5/10/2005
A quick check of CPAN this morning finds SVK 1.0 out on the mirrors. Go ahead and install it with the following (as root):
perl -MCPAN -e ‘install SVK’
Tagged with: SVK
This morning I ran across the FeedWordpress plugin by Charles Johnson. This plugin allows you to actually feed your Wordpress site via RSS feeds.
Unfortunately for me, I had the wrong idea as to what the plugin did. I thought it actually just added links to articles to your blog in a specified category. What it actually does is feed your web site with posts from the RSS feeds, including creating new categories for you. This is great if you are creating a site specifically for aggregation, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
Again, unfortunate for me, I decided to experiment on the production site instead of my development site, using Tom the Architects site and Slashdot as feeds to try the plugin out, resulting in a ton of content being posted to the site without me realizing it. I think I’ve cleaned it all up.
One thing about Wordpress is that it doesn’t facilitate cleaning up a mistake like this easily. It was a pretty laborous process to get everything cleaned up. One thing about me is that I have to learn to stop playing around with things on the main site and use the development site on my local server for these activities.
If you see anything goofy that you might have seen before on another site, let me know so that I can remove it. I’ve double checked to make sure I removed everything, but you know how that goes … you always miss something.
I really have to learn to do more reading before just installing things on the site. However, the plugin works REALLY, REALLY well. Grab it if you want to start an aggregation site.
