D’Oh! – TV Show Dad Necks E With Kids, Gets Arrested
Well, maybe he should have become one of those fuzzy-faced blurred people or something.
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More Teacher Trouble
What is it about teachers these days? This one fed diet pills to her son’s friends then shagged some of them. Or not. But probably yes.
Related here.
RIP AudioGalaxy
So AudioGalaxy, the best of the music sharing sites, is gone. Or at least, emasculated into uselessness. The RIAA threatened AudioGalaxy into changing its copyright protections from an opt-out to an opt-in. Formerly, copyright holders advised Audiogalaxy of their ownership of a specific piece, and this was blocked from file sharing. This system was actually working increasingly well in the last few months and basically anything at all recent or chart-oriented was blocked (at least, under normal spellings). But older stuff, rarer stuff, indie stuff, concert bootlegs and all the wonderfully obscure DJ sets were usually not blocked. Now with this opt-in system, a copyright holder has to explicitly grant AudioGalaxy the “right” to enable its users to share it.
The main problem with this is that all the stuff that’s specifically public domain — or older stuff where the copyright owner is dead or nonexistent or has just plain forgot they own the stuff — is not being shared. And the RIAA goes on disbursing any revenues it receives to the conglomerates and large copyright holders. It’s business as usual.
I reckon I downloaded around 30GB of stuff from AudioGalaxy. Now a lot of that is copyrighted stuff, sure, but most of it, the bulk of the megabytage, is scores of DJ sets from the Love Parade, or North of England clubs, or bizarre mash-up mixes that were pressed onto maybe 500 vinyls so obscure they won’t ever get re-released. This sucks.
Most of those gnutella clients suck majorly, being infected with spyware and incomplete files and juvenilia. And the protocol just plain sucks up bandwidth. I hear the eDonkey/ShareReactor combo works well so I’ll give that a try.
Typical Windows Solution – Uninstall Then Reinstall!
So after finding out a *lot* more than I ever wanted to know about CGI, ISAPI, PHP, and all manner of website trivia, and trying around 20 different code changes and patches, the way I fixed the comments in the end was to uninstall and reinstall IIS. Typical windows.
Who Will Rid Me Of This Troublesome PHP?
So most of the site is back working okay, except for these stupid dotcomments. I’ve put in breakpoints and tracking code and they are executing fine… only not actually writing the files to the disk. And all the permissions are okay. Why is it always the little things that take the longest? So it goes.
Back Once Again With The Renegade Master
Ador said it best then Wildchild sampled it: Back once again with the ill behaviour can ya feel it, its the A for Ali, D for damager, O for outa her, R for the renegade master. And so on.
My server blew up. It was not pretty and produced much acrid smoke. I overloaded the incredibly wimpy 150W power supply that had been running it for the longest time. This fried the motherboard but, luckily thanks to the wonders of RAID 1, I recovered the disk array. I figured it was probably a good time to stop patching a 30-month old $400 CompUSA machine and build a real server. The *new* machine I built from the ground up for *less* than $400, using some bits I had around and some bits I bought. It’s got dual P3 CPUs, a 430W power supply, a mirrored system disk SCSI RAID array, a separate mirrored media disk ATA RAID array, 1GB of ECC RAM, and a rather special case that manages to support five case fans, two CPU fans, and four disk fans. And it’s still got a bunch of vacant drive bays. All this borders on techno fetishism, but I am now reasonably confident that it’s both more robust, faster than the old one, and maybe, perhaps, comment counting will work reliably this time. I also plan to add an additional 6-disk ATA array for some serious storage. Buying the bargain basement 80GB drives would deliver a 400GB array. That’s adequate, but using the newer 160GB drives would give me 800GB. Pretty good, but still not quite a terabyte. I always like to jump my disk storage by a factor of 10 when I upgrade every few years (it’s worked out this way since 1992, call it Mike’s Law) so maybe I’ll delay a few months until the newer, higher density ATA platters arrive – the market’s been lagging at 40GB for a while now. Eventually, of course, everything we ever write or email or copy or watch will fit in the palm of our hand.
But while I was offline, it was nice to get so many emails from concerned people, and my Dad even phoned me to see what was up! Who knew? It’s a weird world when people’s sentiments stretch across continents, mediated through email. Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments comes to mind here — a global economy of mutual sympathy. I think it’s weird how these right-wing monetarist loonies tend to go all orgasmic over his Wealth of Nations stuff yet overlook his more substantial work in sociology.
Giving Them Drugs, Taking Their Lives Away
One of the all-time classic 90s techno songs is Empirion’s Narcotic Influence, with its catchy giving them drugs, taking their lives away chorus, phased 303 rifffage, and that killer bassline. Imagine my surprise, then, while I was watching a really trashy HP Lovecraft movie adaptation (From Beyond, one of those woeful serial HP Lovecraft movies by that guy from Star Trek) and one of the actors, a deranged psychiatrist, utters the line. I thought I might be the first person to spot this, given that the band’s own management website seems confused about its origins, but it was not to be, alas… The original short story is a lot of fun.
Crazy Couple Of Weeks
What a wild two weeks were big, but the difference between knowing and experiencing that fact is simply tremendous. I will never look at the ocean the same way again.
Then I got back and work was crazy, and also risky, because one of our VCs backed out, or something. Then as I was getting used to that, I came down with the most godawful itching and skin rash. Apparently, a thai dish I ate had a shrimp base, and sometime recently my immune system has now developed a most violent aversion to shellfish. I thought I was going to die – this was no way for a veggie to go out! Repeated applications of TLC by Lisa, and lots of anti-histamine, let me muddle through it. My arms are still kind of raw and scabby though.
So when I eventually struggled back into work it was to find myself on the receiving end of some emergency layoffs in order to make a payroll. Sick of it all, I didn’t try to avoid them this time. Maybe it’s time to become a plumber?
Then as I was anticipating relaxing, someone asked me to do a website for them within a week that would normally require several people and a multi-week phased rollout. In the middle of this, I was laid off.
Then we had to go dogsitting out in the Oakland burbs, which was kind of like being trapped in a house with a hyperactive kid who drooled a lot and kept wanting to sniff your balls.
I really hope this week will be somewhat quieter…
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