Planet Linode

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: How to split Varnish log for Virtual host

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:28:08 +0000

Varnish is a great tool that accelerates the performance of your site with a simple configuration and a low usage of resources, compared to the result you’ll get. Just because Varnish is designed and engineered to be fast by default it does not write any log to disk, outrageous you could think … to be honest the logs are available in a memory segment when this memory is filled, Varnish starts from the beginning and overwrites the oldest data in an infinite loop.

So in reality there are logs and they are available for some time, and this solution is much, much faster then logging to a file and it doesn’t require disk space, but how we can get them on file, possibly divided by virtual host as do Apache or Nginx ?

The first tool that we can use to see the logs is varnishlog, from the varnish site:

varnishlog is one of the programs you can use to look at what Varnish is logging. Varnishlog gives you the raw logs, everything that is written to the logs. There are other clients as well, we’ll show you these later.

In the terminal window you started varnish now type varnishlog and press enter.
….
11 SessionOpen  c 127.0.0.1 58912 0.0.0.0:8080
11 ReqStart     c 127.0.0.1 58912 595005213
11 RxRequest    c GET
11 RxURL        c /
11 RxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
11 RxHeader     c Host: localhost:8080
11 RxHeader     c Connection: keep-alive
The first column is an arbitrary number, it defines the request. Lines with the same number are part of the same HTTP transaction. The second column is the tag of the log message. All log entries are tagged with a tag indicating what sort of activity is being logged. Tags starting with Rx indicate Varnish is recieving data and Tx indicates sending data.

The third column tell us whether this is is data coming or going to the client (c) or to/from the backend (b). The forth column is the data being logged.

So varnishlog is an interesting tool for a live session when you want to verify if your varnish is doing what you expect, but not so useful when you want to put the logs into a file.

So let’s move to Varnishncsa, another varnish tool that can be much more useful for our goal, Varnishncsa display Varnish logs in Apache / NCSA combined log format

The basic usage from the command line is:

varnishncsa -a -w /var/log/varnish/access.log -D -P /var/run/varnishncsa.pid

-a: To append the logs to an already existing file
-w: To write the logs to the /var/log/varnish/access.log file
-D: To run varnishncsa as a daemon
-P: To write the PID file in the /var/run/ folder

The problem wIth this command is that we’ll get just 1 access.log file that is good as long as we manage with Varnish just 1 Virtual hosts, but could be not so useful if we want to have 1 file for every Virtual host defined in our Web server.

A good solution that I’ve found in the blog blox.xcir.net is to have 1 dedicated daemon for every virtual host and use the flag -m that is used to perform a regex match to the tag’s log entry so if we have 2 virtual host: linuxaria.com and linuxaria.org we could start 2 daemons with:

varnishncsa -m "RxHeader:^Host: linuxaria.com$" -a -w /var/log/varnish/linuxaria.com.access_log -D
varnishncsa -m "RxHeader:^Host: linuxaria.org$" -a -w /var/log/varnish/linuxaria.org.access_log -D

And these 2 daemons will generate 2 access_log files with the entry only for these Virtual hosts, now you can use logrotate to rotate the logs every day, just remember to restart the daemon in this case, or statistics software like awstats.

RealFreeMarket.org: The Fallacy Of Shareholder Lawsuits

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:46 +0000

I already mentioned that JP Morgan Chase lost $2B on derivative trades. This article was interesting. There may be shareholder lawsuits against JP Morgan Chase, regarding the $2B loss.

As I mentioned before, suing the government is pointless. Government workers are protected by “sovereign immunity”, unless their crime is truly egregious. When you sue the government, any victory is not paid by the government workers, but by the government’s general fund. Everyone else pays higher taxes, to pay for the verdict.

For example, suppose that a policeman shoots and murders you, saying “I thought he had a gun!” The district attorney says “It was a reasonable mistake!”, and refuses to pursue criminal charges. Your relatives file a “wrongful death lawsuit”, and win $25M. The $25M isn’t paid by the policeman who murdered you, or by the police department’s budget. It’s paid from the government’s general fund. In a city of 5M people, in effect, every person pays $5 more in taxes, to pay for your verdict. Your relatives got $25M, but it’s functionally equivalent to stealing $5 from every other person living in the city.

The government workers don’t pay the damages themselves. Therefore, suing the government provides zero incentive for government workers to behave. Even if there is a lawsuit loss, they aren’t paying it themselves.

There shareholder lawsuits are similarly ridiculous. Why? The cost of the verdict is not paid by the CEO or Board of Directors or employees. The cost is paid by the corporation! In the fine print of a CEO or BoD contract, it says “The corporation will reimburse you, if you get sued based on your work for us.”

If JP Morgan Chase shareholders win $2B in a shareholder lawsuit, that money doesn’t come from the CEO or Board of Directors. That money comes from JP Morgan Chase’s shareholders! The shareholders are suing themselves!

It does make a slight difference, if you already sold your shares. In that case, a former shareholder is suing the current shareholders. However, the damages in these lawsuits tend to be pennies per share. The only people who profit are the lawyers.

For another example, there’s a Bank of America class action lawsuit, regarding the buyout of Merrill Lynch and improper disclosure. I own the same number of shares of Bank of America now as I did a few years ago during the merger. In effect, I’m suing myself (with the lawyers getting a cut). If I “win” $0.05 per share in that class action lawsuit, I’m losing $0.05 per share from the shares I already own. plus an additional loss of $0.05+ per share for legal expenses.

This story was interesting. Executives at MF Global took out a $170M “insurance policy”, to cover their legal expenses if MF Global failed and they were sued. The bankruptcy trustee claims that the $170M belongs to the customers. That seems obvious to me, but a Statist judge might rule otherwise.

Before MF Global went bankrupt, the executives spent the shareholder’s money to buy insurance to cover themselves if MF Global went bankrupt and they were sued. That’s crazy! Due to the way insurance and bankruptcy law work, that enables the executives to set aside pre-bankruptcy money to pay themselves after the bankruptcy. If the premium on the insurance policy were $200M, the executives would buy it anyway, because it provides money if the corporation goes bankrupt.

MF Global no longer exists, so MF Global can’t reimburse the executives for their loss. Via that “insurance” loophole, the executives managed to save some money. You shouldn’t be able to buy insurance that covers criminal negligence.

It is pointless to sue the government. The money is not paid by the State employees who misbehave, but rather by all the other taxpayers. Similarly, it’s pointless for shareholders to sue executives. The money is not paid by the executives, but rather by the other shareholders. In this manner, State insiders have nearly zero accountability when they do bad things. This is true for people who work directly for the State, and for State insiders who control large corporations.

Holy Shmoly: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:50:09 +0000

WordPress uses memory. Plugins and themes use memory. New versions of software may use more memory than before. When that happens and PHP on your server doesn’t have enough memory then PHP will stop with a fatal error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1203208 bytes) in /home/*****/public_html/wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php on line 4215

This happens quite a bit but it’s not a bug in WordPress or your new plugin or theme, you simply need to let PHP use more memory on your server. Thankfully WordPress makes it easy to do this. You must define a constant, WP_MEMORY_LIMIT in your server’s wp-config.php like this:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’128M’);

The error message will give you an idea of how much memory is required. The error message says it tried to allocate 1203208 bytes or just over 1MB of memory. The limit here is 67108864 bytes, or 65536KB which is 64MB so here I’d need a WP_MEMORY_LIMIT of more than 66M. The error message will go away once PHP has enough memory but be sure to test it.

If you allocate too much memory your server could start eating into disk swap space. Also be aware that each Apache child process is allowed to use that much memory so if you had ten processes it could use ten times the memory limit in a worst case scenario. If that happens you’ll need more RAM or you’ll have to figure out what’s using so much memory.

There’s also a WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT constant. By default it’s 256M and it’s currently only used when uploading images.

On the off chance that you don’t have WordPress installed and you came here from a search engine, then you’ll want to use ini_set() somewhere early in the PHP process to increase the memory limit:

ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’128M’);

Finally, I love that the wp-config.php codex page is the first result of a search for WP_MEMORY_LIMIT.

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Holy Shmoly: Batman Says No

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:40:40 +0000

The Fiscal Treaty approaches. Batman will vote NO and fight on against all odds.

Favourite part? Gilmore as Two Face, or the explanation for the Joker’s name. (via)

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Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Changes in the ZorinOS Contest Rules

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:21:39 +0000

Have you heard about the contest which is currently running for all the Linux lovers, especially for fans of Zorin OS?

If you have not heard of it, then you have missed a lot.

Zorin OS team, Linuxaria and Linux notes from DarkDuck are giving prizes for the best Linux- or ZorinOS-related stories.

The contest was announced on the 6th of May and was planned to run for 2 weeks.

I am happy to announce that the contest has been extended to 1 months for the many submissions we are receiving.

You can submit your stories until the 6th of June, and organizers will decided who gets the prizes on the 8th of June.

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In Photos: Dungarvan Cakes

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:29:16 +0000

Cakes in the window of a shop/café in the square in Dungarvan, Co Waterford.

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Holy Shmoly: The amazing self charging Android phone

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:05:40 +0000

Some things never change. Both Android phones I’ve owned (Samsung Galaxy S 1 & 2) have this weird bug where the phone turns itself off and when reset by removing the battery the charge level has gone way down.

I woke early this morning to discover the PIN unlock screen so I guessed the phone had rebooted. When I checked the battery levels I saw this. The battery suddenly lost a huge chunk of charge sometime during the night but over the next few hours seemed to recharge itself.

I’d say it’s magic.

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RealFreeMarket.org: Cheating At MLB2k12 $1M Perfect Game Contest

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:27 +0000

This story was funny. The MLB baseball game MLB2k12 had a “perfect game challenge”. If you pitched a perfect game, you were eligible to enter a contest for $1M. The code had countermeasures to prevent cheating, but there was a gaping loophole.

You were allowed to make substitutions before the start of the game, including the opposing team! You could take out the other team’s best hitters, and replace them with .200 average scrubs! That’s cheating, but the game allowed it and the rules allowed it.

That totally ruins the integrity of the contest.

I went for a few job interviews where they were organizing Internet gambling. I questioned the legality, but they said “The game has no random element. Therefore, it’s legal.” I pointed out “People will cheat!”, but they were not concerned.

People will cheat even when no money is involved. People cheat at World of Warcraft. When money is involved, people will find another way to cheat.

Even though the game has countermeasures against cheating, there still will be loopholes. If you can run a game on your hardware, some clever hacker will always figure out a way to cheat.

That was amusing. People cheated at the MLB2k12 “Perfect Game Contest”, due to a loophole in the game and the rules. People will always find a way to cheat, when money is involved. People will even cheat when there’s no money involved.

The Official Site of Ill Poetic: “Gone” Official Video

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:13:07 +0000

Nearly a year in the making, here is the official video to “Gone”, directed by David Damen// of Arris Productions & Walter Nini, and Premiering through my friends over at Citybeat.

This is the first definitive release for my new EP “Synesthesia: The Yellow Movement” , which will be dropping later this Summer. It’s also the first domino we’re tipping over in a *very* long line of dominoes (be on the look out for new songs, videos, tour footage, shows, documentaries, etc.)

To quote my twitter timeline from yesterday, as I’m too lazy to write more today:

This video was made for people brave (read:stupid) enough to jump off the cliff and follow their dreams & passions. Leaving my job and life behind to do this as a potential career is easily the craziest, scariest, dumbest, smartest thing I’ve ever done. The video is also a token of appreciation for all the people, places, and memories Cincinnati has given me. Thank You.

If you genuinely dig the music and video, I just ask that you share, RT, post and spread this as far as possible. If not, don’t;)

Below is a full list of contributors who made this possible:

David Damen // + Walter Nini presents

Ill Poetic | Gone

Produced by Ill Poetic

Directed by | David Damen // + Walter Nini

Edited by Walter Nini Chris Cloud

Additional Vocals D’Yenna Dukes

Camera Operators Walter Nini &Chris Cloud

Appearances by Mr. Dibbs, Rare Groove, Apryl Reign, Huntor Prey, BJ Digby (Holmskillit), Dj Tree, Sharp One, Nati Kid (Animal Crackers), Jarvis Tubbs , Becca + Nadia Burling & Mc Forty

Additional Footage Scribble Jam 2003 & Cincinnati Riots 2001 (Courtesy of ‘Panic City‘)

Addition Photography provided by Ill Poetic

Special Thanks Dive Bar & Selectas Choice

Game Development in Epitaph: Computer Games Journal

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:57:06 +0000

My apologies for the lack of posting, for all of you who care - busy busy busy. However, to tide you over, can I recommend you check out http://www.computergamesjournal.com/ - volume one, edition one, where you will find my paper 'Inaccessible through oversight: the need for inclusive game design' has just been published.

It's not hugely relevant to MUDs (although they do get a shout-out), but I have a second paper undergoing peer review for the same journal - if that one is accepted, you will find it absolutely dripping with text based goodness.

I hope to resume a normal blogging schedule from next week onwards.

Regards,

Drakkos...

Click on the link for the rest of this post.

Holy Shmoly: Welcome to Life

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:15:22 +0000

Tom Scott looks at what a corporate sponsored and controlled afterlife might be like. Creepy.

That’s why you must choose The Pirate Bay as your primary healthcare provider.

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Caffeinated: And now for something completely different... Cufón sux.

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:09:05 +0000

So... I've started seeing a lot of this JavaScript library called Cufón. Fonts for the People it says.

UGH! Please people, stop relying on JavaScript DOM hijacking for delivering web fonts. It's notoriously unreliable and requires just too much work to manage.

HTML5 and CSS3 are where web development is at, and both are fucking reliable and gracefully degrade. If you have not read HTML5 and CSS3: Develop Today with Tomorrow's Standards by Brian P. Hogan (Pragmatic Bookshelf) and have not read chapter 19, Using Real Fonts, please, if you use Cufón and/or you're a web dev, stop reading this, click the above link and get rid of Cufón.

Right.

Now.

Dan Stoner: Do Not Collect Army Ants

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:11:24 +0000

We just set up an ANTWORKS ant farm. It's pretty cool. The gel inside was developed by NASA to send ants into space. Take heed of the warning about Army Ants:

"Note: DO NOT attempt to collect Army Ants in your ANTWORKS container. Should you see several hundred thousand very focused ants moving in your direction, we advise quickly leaving the area."

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Too many passwords to keep in your mind? Here is a great solution! Cross-platform and portable!

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:37:13 +0000

Credit cards, SIM cards, social networking sites and forums are just some of the many services that can give us trouble. That’s right … Each of these, now, requires passwords and codes that you must keep secrets. I can not remember everything for sure! The only solutions are the ones that we all know. Use a general password? too risky! An intuitive and memorable password? Unfortunately also too risky! Also writing them all in some paper is not a good idea … In fact, in addition to being found by others it could even be missed by us! So … what a beautiful mess!

If you too have these problems I have a solution for you! I’m talking about a software that keeps all your passwords. Not a simple database program, but a real key manager that you can crypt at very high levels and at the same time, very easy to use. I’m talking about KeePass. An amazing cross-platform software ! This characteristic makes it one of the best around! This software, in fact, can be really used on any electronic device ! In your office you have a terrible Win98 or Seven, or any other Microsoft product ? No problem … you can install it through the usual .exe files ! But you can use it also on Linux, just install from your package manager, “KeePassX“, “KeeDroid” in your Android, or other versions available for your Mac, Ipad, Iphone, Ipod, Symbian and even in other devices …
It seems incredible but that’s it! You can have your passwords wherever you want. With the right precautions to keep updated on all devices your password archive! The best solution to achieve this ?

These are some solutions that you can use:

1) If you have a smartphone, save the file onit. And open it from any PC or laptop simply by connecting the device and running the software from your PC!

2) IMO the best solution is to keep the archive on the clouds, with a good password of course, and choose a service that encrypt the files such as Spideroak.

The practicality of this software is one of the key features that make it a leader in this field. But also many other interesting features. First it’s Open source, very intuitive, thanks to the interface translated into many languages and a very simple, very complete, lightweight and, above all, safe structure. Even in the security of its components is king! To access your password you have two choices. A simple “keyphrase” or you can combine this with a file. In short, you must either set a password or give to the software the path of a file that will allow the opening of the archive.

Other features of KeePassX include:

Extensive management- title for each entry for its better identification

possibility to determine different expiration dates
insertion of attachments
user-defined symbols for groups and entries
fast entry dublication
sorting entries in groups

Search function

search either in specific groups or in complete database

Database security

access to the KeePassX database is granted either with a password, a key-file (e.g. a CD or a memory-stick) or even both.

Automatic generation of secure passwords

extremly customizable password generator for fast and easy creation of secure passwords

Precaution features

quality indicator for chosen passwords
hiding all passwords behind asterisks

Encryption- either the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) or the Twofish algorithm are used

encryption of the database in 256 bit sized increments

Import and export of entries

import from PwManager (*.pwm) and KWallet (*.xml) files- export as textfile (*.txt)

Operating system independent

KeePassX is cross platform, so are the databases, as well

Conclusions

Well, you’ve got a software that will allow and will guarantee the absolute safety for the management of the passwords. Now you just need to head to the official page, or store or access your repository and start the download!
And please … when you open the file make sure not to be under prying eyes! All in all … yes … is tested against hacking or bruteforce … but not from the nosy!

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The Official Site of Ill Poetic: Patrice O’Neal NY Magazine Memorium

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:00:28 +0000

Below is a really great piece on Comedian Patrice O’Neal by NYMag.com

If you visit this site, you know that I love Music & Comedy. I’m fascinated at how well they relate and inspire eachother as artforms. Patrice was no exception. Dude was very slept-on when he was alive. He took his craft very seriously and brought an uncomfortable honesty to any room he walked in. His podcast and radio interviews are entertaining as well as his stand-up specials and classic runs on Chappelle’s “Player Hater’s Ball”

I threw some clips in here for you to get familiar as you read it.

Enjoy.

Even comedians—who rarely shut up—had to surrender whenever Patrice O’Neal began to talk. He’s the guy they would call on the long drive home from Magooby’s Joke House who loved to discuss—at length—whether Jay-Z would ever cheat on Beyoncé, or the various options for black reparations, or the best adjectives for different smells of pussy. He was a master at introducing subjects that you never even knew you had an opinion about—like whether you’d be willing to have sex with a girl who had no nose. Even though O’Neal was usually doing 90 percent of the talking, listening had the feel of conversation, in part because he was famously picky about whom he’d talk to, and in part because he always implicated you in his investigations. Whether the topic was crass or ridiculous, he demanded a response. The transformative power of the ugly truth was, for O’Neal, a form of grace.

If O’Neal was known for working his conversations offstage, he was equally well known for taking big risks with his audiences. “If you watched Patrice, all his shows were different and he didn’t write any of his material down,” says Bill Burr, a comic who came up with him in Boston. “He got to it in a new way every night. As long as I knew him, he was always working on trying to attain a level of freedom onstage where he could just go up there and talk to the crowd. To me, that was the Pryor school of stand-up comedy.” Of the many things O’Neal’s peers admired about his performances—the assertions he got away with, the sly surprise of his punch lines, the seamlessness with which he skated between warmth and disgust—what excited them most was the way his shows built as his attention moved among his listeners, sparking off their fears and desires and stirring them up.

“When you question a lot, you are wrong a lot—so wrong—but he’d present the case like a champion,” says Keith Robinson, a comedian and former roommate. “I’m arguing, and at the same time thinking, How this dude is working this!” O’Neal was always maneuvering to make room for the man he was still discovering himself to be—a seeker with competing appetites and sorrows; a half-domesticated feminist super-misogynist; an iconoclastic black man who defended the freedom of white racists on Fox News; a brilliant 325-pound jock philosopher from the hood whose favorite books were Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Skinny Bitch: A No-Nonsense, Tough-Love Guide for Savvy Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap and Start Looking Fabulous!

“He was an artful dodger who kept researching himself,” says Robinson. And he expected others to make the same effort. His fiancée, Vondecarlo Brown, said it wasn’t unusual for him to lay into a cashier at Marshalls about her bad attitude; Brown would return from her shopping 40 minutes later to find the duo strategizing about ways the cashier might pursue her dreams. Talking led to what Patrice called “the reveal”—whatever tender or humiliating fact an honest conversation might unearth. Civilians didn’t always have the stomach for it, but comedians usually appreciated the insight. As comic Amy Schumer explained, “The only things he would say were things I didn’t see about myself.”

I’d been researching a book on stand-up for years, and people kept telling me I needed to speak with Patrice, but I always found a reason to put it off. To begin with, his reputation preceded him. He was six-foot-five, extremely loud, a bully, and an expert at leveraging white guilt. Once, at the HBO offices, I overheard his blowtorch of invective when noise in the lobby interrupted his meeting. He had reduced Lisa Lampanelli, an insult comic, to tears. Last year, we finally exchanged numbers, after which he casually eviscerated a young publicist nearby (“Shut your hole,” he said, with a purity of contempt that was striking, even though I was a comedy survivor by then). All of this convinced me that I needed more preparation. I never pursued Patrice O’Neal, and then he was dead.

This past December, at the Park Avenue Christian Church’s funeral for Patrice Lumumba Malcolm O’Neal, the comedians sat quietly. Some wore suits. Others spruced up in their own ways—baseball hats clenched in hands, T-shirts tucked in, slacks instead of jeans. Chris Rock and Kevin Hart wore sneakers, but they were there, along with Wanda Sykes and Artie Lange. Headliners spend a lot of time on the road; it was unusual to see so many of them gathered in one place. In the dim church light, they looked especially wan.

A pro who had known O’Neal for about twenty years later confessed that he’d had to work up the courage to make an appearance because he could hear Patrice’s voice booming, “What the fuck are you doing here?” Another stayed home because he imagined Patrice rising from the casket to lob a similar rebuke. O’Neal would have enjoyed the discomfort—discomfort was one of his favorite tools. At the same time, he would have appreciated the consideration; he gave serious thought to when and where he chose to show up.

Jim Norton stood. The third mike of radio’s “The Opie & Anthony Show,” Norton had clocked in thousands of hours of conversation with Patrice both on and off the air. They’d toured together and done TV shows together and gotten prostitutes together. Norton also heard Patrice ridiculing him as he approached the lectern—“Shut up!”—but he found the familiar blast of insult reassuring. For the nearly six weeks that Patrice had been in a coma following a stroke last fall, the “O&A” show had become a cross between a hospital waiting room and a coffee shop. Comedians kept stopping by and calling in with their favorite Patrice stories; after he died, the stories continued to pour in. Comics spoke about the thrill of witnessing someone’s first takedown by Patrice and the suitcase full of dildos he brought hookers on his trips to Brazil. They also rehashed the highlights of his bridge-burning career—his lousy attitude when he auditioned for Chris Rock; his unwillingness to keep his schedule open for Spike Lee; his refusal to travel to L.A. for additional work on The Office,where he had a recurring role.

At the church, Norton read a few of the hundreds of e-mails sent in by “O&A” listeners. One wrote, “I never had someone make me laugh so hard, while saying things I couldn’t agree with less.” Another woman introduced herself as a friend of Eddie Brill’s, the former booker for David Letterman, who’d met Patrice after he opened for Denis Leary at Carnegie Hall in 2004. He’d stared at her nipples and said, “Well, at least one of them is happy to see me!” The woman explained that she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When Patrice seemed to doubt her, she found herself flashing him to prove it; he had roared with laughter and enveloped her in a bear hug. When Norton had visited Patrice in the hospital, he told him how many people were asking after him. “Of course,” said Norton, “he couldn’t respond, and I realized, in all the years I’ve known him, this is the first time I’ve ever dominated a conversation with Patrice.”

Colin Quinn went next. “That was very nice, what Jim said,” he began somberly. Then he paused, and the comics, suddenly alert, sat up a bit straighter for what they hoped was coming. “ ‘Eddie Brill’s a friend?’ Why would you include that? You irrelevant idiot.” People laughed and shifted in the pews; they were loosening up. Quinn recalled how even on his own TV show, Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, the network frequently gave him can-you-shut-up-Patrice? notes. “You couldn’t shut Patrice up any more than you could shut off a river,” he said. “Patrice is the only guy I can imagine trying to meet God as an equal. If I could somehow be looking at him in Heaven right now, and watched him meet God, I know I’d be thinking the same thing everybody else would be thinking. ‘Uh-oh, God shouldn’t have said that. Now he’s going to get hammered by Patrice.’ ”

Other performances followed. Wil Sylvince, O’Neal’s longtime roommate, spoke about how Patrice disabused him of stereotypes of overweight men: He didn’t smell, didn’t leave food lying around, and always had women. Kevin Hart, who now fills stadiums, remembered a night at the Comedy Cellar when Patrice and the other big-shot comics tossed telephone books at him. As Robert Kelly approached the podium, he imagined what Patrice would have said—“Speak from your heart, asshole!”—so he did. Rich Vos followed, scoring points off both Kelly and “Lil Kev,” then preempting ridicule about his own stalled career. “I’ll be selling my DVDs and CDs on the church steps after the service,” he said, waiting a beat before adding, “just as Patrice would have wanted it.” O’Neal, a terrible self-promoter, hated merchandise.

The funeral was in many ways just the kind of room Patrice liked to work in—with people he loved, stripping away one another’s pretensions to get to a more honest place, and ultimately on his terms. Not surprisingly, this dynamic had eluded him in Hollywood, and he had repeatedly tried to re-create it on cable, the web, and radio. He operated in what a former manager called “Patrice time”—at his own pace and on the assumption that others would eventually catch up. At one point, he’d come up with an idea for a show: The Patrice O’Neal Show, Starring Other People. The Park Avenue Christian Church was as close as he was going to get, but he wasn’t there to see it.

Patrice was not regarded as a man of many secrets. No topic seemed off-limits: his laziness; his loneliness; his threesomes; he’d even discussed his terror of prison, where he’d spent time on a statutory-rape conviction when he was a teenager. But many of the comics at the funeral were caught off-guard when Vondecarlo’s 12-year-old daughter, Aymilyon, in her bright-pink dress and rhinestone headband, spoke without a trace of irony about the man she liked to call Mr. P. It was clear from her description of the things he’d taught her—to try new things, to laugh when she was angry, and to argue for her opinion—that she, too, had known the same Patrice. This surprise guest was a classic Patrice closer: evidence that required you to reconsider everything that came before it. At a funeral that resembled a roast, the reveal wasn’t the mention of sex tourism or a breast-cancer flasher, but that he had been a father, too.

By November 2010, when O’Neal finally taped his first hour-long special, Elephant in the Room, at NYU, his health was failing and he knew his time was running out, but he acted as though he had plenty. He looked over the assembled and smiled his charmingly demonic gap-toothed grin. He didn’t open with a foolproof bit. Instead, he warmly objectified a black woman in his line of sight. “I am thanking one in particular pair of titties,” he said, delighting in another eyeful, then making a point of the televised context of the show: “Thank you, audience coordinator, for putting those titties up in the front row.” Then he grunted. So begins the Comedy Central special that he hoped would broaden his appeal.

He next bestows his approval on a black man’s date: “Congratulations to you, my friend!” he says. “Look at that white woman you’re with!” He invites the audience to consider this fine specimen: “Black women get mad at that. But that is top-shelf white woman right there.” He’s arranging and rearranging members of the audience on various sides of an argument that they don’t quite know they’re in yet.

“You know how you tell how pretty a white woman is? The value?” he asks. “You look at her and then wonder how long they would look for her if she was missing.” He points to the evidence already at hand: “C’mon, take a look. Take a look! Look at this! Look!” Everyone is laughing, but you can hear uneasiness. He appeases it by enlisting a black woman to exploit the prejudices he’s now juggling. “I saw you look mad, sweetie,” he says as if he’s talking only to her. “If you was missing, how long you think they would look?” He reports back to the crowd, mimicking her mournful shrug. He lets the sorry truth land: “White woman’s life is valuable.” He then asks the audience to help him remember the point he was originally getting at: “What’s his name—Joran van der Sloot? We find out he was a serial kill—man, he kills women, that’s what he do,” he says. “What’s the girl in Aruba?”

“Natalee Holloway!” people shout out.

“But the one—he just killed the girl in Peru, what’s her name?”

Silence.

“Exactly!” he says. The audience cracks up and breaks into applause, simultaneously chagrined and excited to have sprung that trap he’s set for them.

All this, he explains, is why he’s taking a white baby along when he goes sailing, just in case the boat sinks, to be sure that someone will come looking for him: “I’ma dress the baby real white, too. I’ma put sweatpants on it, and a pair of Ugg boots, and I’ma take a picture,” he says, snapping the photo with his imaginary iPhone. “ ‘If you don’t come get me, this white baby going down!’ ”

O’Neal believed that stand-up—if it was any good—had to take prisoners, that it was always at someone’s expense. And if anybody was going to be uncomfortable, it wasn’t going to be him.

The only place Patrice O’Neal was ever comfortably second-seated was during the early years, as a passenger in other comics’ cars—as long as they were going his way. Bill Burr took him to the open mike at Nick’s Comedy Stop in his red Ford Ranger; Robert Kelly drove him in his gray Nissan 280-ZX to the one at Stitches, another Boston club. Owing to his size, O’Neal would have to move his leg whenever Kelly would shift into fifth gear. O’Neal preferred Dane Cook’s turquoise Lincoln Town Car with the whitewall tires—young bucks, Pimp A and Pimp B. But their coolness was just a pose. “There was a lot of sensitivity,” says Cook. “I remember an eager Patrice.”

O’Neal grew up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in a private house across from the projects, and he attended a suburban school, mostly white. At West Roxbury High, he played football well enough to earn an athletic scholarship, which he declined in order to study the performing arts at Northeastern. He worked as a bouncer at the Comedy Connection before climbing onstage—and then quickly went from holding doors for other comics to being one of the most promising among them.

O’Neal got laughs faster than most beginners do, but he was more interested in how stand-up could work for him. Gary Gulman still remembers one surefire bit of Patrice’s (“I’m the leader of the fat people, I’m Malcolm XXL”). “Some guys would hold on to that joke for their entire career. It’d be the name of their album and special, they’d have T-shirts,” Gulman says. “That was not his thing.” O’Neal allowed himself to have moods onstage. He’d change the wording of a perfect sequence from one night to the next, explaining, “I want to say it how I mean it, and maybe I meant it differently than I did yesterday.” Bill Burr recalls, “Patrice was like a musician, trying to free himself.”

Dane Cook remembers one discussion they had about people-pleasing. Patrice wondered if the desire to be liked onstage might be coming from the need to protect a belief in oneself as a nice guy offstage. What if you weren’t that guy at all?

For comics to truly realize themselves as performers, they must learn to traffic in their vulnerabilities, but the stakes were particularly high for Patrice. By the time he was 17, he had been convicted of a sex crime against a white woman—a stigma that so scarred him that he didn’t discuss it publicly for decades. According to his story, he and some friends met up with two 15-year-old girls and they ended up having sex together. The boys bragged about the encounter, and another boy used the gossip to blackmail the white girl for a blow job. As rumors spread, the girl started saying she’d been raped—first by her blackmailer, then by the original group. O’Neal and his best friend, the only two who admitted having sex, were convicted of statutory rape, for which they served 60 days in an assessment center that summer.

O’Neal would remain haunted by the swiftness with which—on the word of a woman—his identity could be obliterated by a stereotype. In the 2005 “O&A” interview where he went public with the experience, O’Neal noted that there was no room for the uncomfortable truth in the story: white girls who want to have sex with black boys. What had saved him was that the girl, too, was unimportant in the wider world: “I am a giant nigger in Boston. If this girl had been the mayor’s daughter, if she had been some white girl out there doing some George Bush’s daughter shit, and it came out that she gave all these niggers some pussy? You wouldn’t know me.”

The interconnections among victimization, accountability, race, and desire proved to be rich imaginative terrain. In one popular early bit about littering, he says, “I’m afraid if I toss a can of soda over my shoulder, it will fly over a bush and land on some dead white woman’s head, with my fingerprints on the can. Now I’m the Pepsi Cola Rapist—’cause I’m lazy.” He explained that he always made sure to create a ready-made paper-trail alibi for himself, buying something every fifteen minutes and demanding a time-stamped receipt.

O’Neal’s work fought back not by running from the stereotypes but by refashioning them and trying them on, to see what fit—and what didn’t—and he coaxed his audiences to do the same. Could women really deny that they wore sexy clothing at work to turn men on? Didn’t all men have “rape-y” thoughts? O’Neal was determined that his comedy be something scary and exciting that he and the audience were creating together—they wouldn’t be able to pretend they hadn’t been a part of it afterward.

He found his ideal audience in 2002 at the comedians’ table at the Comedy Cellar in New York. The Cellar is a workout club where pros try out material in fifteen-minute sets. Before and after going on, they often hung around the table in the back of the restaurant upstairs—gossiping and eating and arguing. Colin Quinn compared it to the Round Table at the Algonquin—if the table were a mosh pit. “Ripping down is love in comedy,” says Dane Cook. “It can be very cold. It’s a weird hazing that comics do to keep each other on point.”

“We teased him forever,” says Keith Robinson. “We beat him out of himself.” But Patrice gave as good as he got, then gave some more. “When Patrice was around, you had to raise your game,” says Rich Vos. Bill Burr prepared for even casual encounters with his old friend: “I’d come up with a dozen insults, do two or three, and he’d swat you to the ground.”

The conversation became the genesis for Quinn’s show, Tough Crowd. Patrice was one of the regulars from the start. Quinn would introduce topics—race, religion, sex, politics—and the other comics would bat them around. The stand-up Laurie Kilmartin, who wrote for the show, admired O’Neal’s swagger—to get a word in “you just had to wait for him to run out of breath,” she says—but she admired his range even more. “He had the ability to go other places other comics couldn’t go because he didn’t show a lot of bitterness, he showed a lot of curiosity,” she says. “He would keep the ball in the air.”

After two seasons, Comedy Central canceled the show. For O’Neal, its ideal conditions would prove hard to replicate: work that felt like play, raised his visibility, and paid him to be himself. By this time, however, O’Neal had assembled a respectable résumé: the festivals (Aspen, Montreal); guest spots on television (Chappelle’s Show, Arrested Development, and more); and movies (25th Hour, Head of State). The half-hour specials came easily: Showtime, Comedy Central, HBO. The development deals didn’t pan out, but that wasn’t unusual. Meanwhile, the archive of Patrice stories grew—the lucrative offers shunned, the budgets stretched by his time-sucking monologues, the verbal pummeling of executives.

He was also making enemies among his peers. The less frequent guests on Tough Crowd had found him bullying. At the Cellar, he derided Lisa Lampanelli so viciously that she avoided the table altogether. “I wasted more tears on this guy than an ex-boyfriend,” she told me. “It takes a coward to be a fucking asshole in real life,” she said, before repeating a remark made recently by a New York club owner: “Now I’m going to have to say I liked him because he’s dead?”

But likability didn’t rank high on Patrice’s list of values. In 2006, he was invited to host VH1’s Web Junk 20, a video-countdown show. “I don’t do ‘Hurry up,’ ” he said on the first day of production, and proceeded to abuse everyone on the set. During the shoots for subsequent episodes, the allotted four hours frequently turned to eight. The crew sometimes laughed so hard that they felt physically sick.

One career strategy in stand-up is that TV brings you popularity, which brings you freedom to do your real work. But Web Junk fans who came to his live performances found an angry Socrates holding forth on race and sex, driving people from the room on a regular basis. What happened to the funny black guy wisecracking about masturbating-cat videos? In 2007, he declined to renew for a third season—even when VH1 offered to quadruple his salary.

Patrice wasn’t primarily after money; he hoped to inspire some kind of personal reckoning. “And so?” was a favorite retort. “Fix yourself,” he’d say. “You’ll feel better, you’ll see.” He didn’t make it easy. Dante Nero, who sometimes opened for him, recalled one college gig when a young woman yelled, “Say something funny!” during one of Patrice’s philosophical disquisitions. “You didn’t hear anyone else laughing?” O’Neal began. “Is it because you weren’t laughing? You the type of person who wants everyone to be miserable if you’re miserable?” Then he turned to her friends: “Why do you hang out with her?” The girl stood up to leave, demanding her boyfriend join her, but he sat there, frozen, and O’Neal zeroed in on him—as an ally. “If you stay, it’ll be over,” O’Neal said encouragingly. “Ride it out.” The audience started to weigh in. The girl began to cry.

“Patrice kept going and going, twisting the knife,” said Nero. “I give them a piece of candy to get it down. But Patrice thought, ‘It got to be Buckley’s’ ”—the cough syrup—“ ‘a nasty lesson should taste nasty, and you don’t get a piece of candy afterward.’ ” The mixed metaphors here are telling; whether O’Neal was a healer or an assassin could be difficult to say. Between 2006 and 2008, he ministered to the lovelorn on “The Black Philip Show”—originally subtitled “Bitch Management”—which he co-hosted with Nero on SiriusXM. On this send-up of Dr. Phil, his advice is by turns poetic and appalling. One moment Patrice is patiently explaining to a heartbroken 20-year-old that he needs to sort through his pain because “sorrow carries over to the next relationship,” and the next he’s berating a female caller for what he considers her inflated sense of self: “Tell me why I shouldn’t call you a bitch, bitch?” Throughout, his conviction that men must fight to figure out how to meet their needs is blisteringly clear.

Vondecarlo, who is a singer, compares their courtship to the way he broke down an audience. In this case, the set lasted nearly ten years. “He said I suffered from Pretty Girl Syndrome,” she says. O’Neal accused her of treating her hotness as a substitute for personality; he refused to sleep with her for months. On “O&A,” the porn stars andPenthouse Pets dreaded being booked with Patrice. He’d badger them for not having opinions and zoom in on every little thing—including a tiny pimple on one girl’s butt.

Gino Tomac, O’Neal’s writing partner, learned that simply agreeing didn’t let him off the hook: He had to prove he’d reckoned with Patrice’s reasoning. Tomac remembers an endless treatise on the precise differences between “yep” and “yeah” and “yes.” The writer described the collaborative process as “brutal” and “painful” and “torture.” He also said he’d give anything for the chance to do it again. Their 2007 web series, “The Patrice O’Neal Show, Coming Soon!” couldn’t find a sponsor because there wasn’t a group it didn’t offend.

In 2010, Neal Brennan, the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, wrote a pilot with a character inspired by Patrice—harsh and philosophical, in a warm way. Brennan phoned him and cut to the chase: “Are you going to be a dick?”

“How you going to be asking me if I’m going to be a dick?” Patrice said. Then he launched into a two-hour meditation on his philosophy of being a dick. “Neal,” Patrice said finally, “I can’t promise you that I won’t be a dick.”

Three remarkable interviews with fellow comedians Ron Bennington, Paul Provenza, and Marc Maron between 2007 and 2010 map O’Neal’s empathetic imagination at work. They also document a middle-aged comic original taking stock of his creative needs in a business that had, for the most part, failed to meet him at his best. He knew he was enormously talented and that his stand-up was important. He remained both wounded and mystified by his irrelevance in the broader culture, and he also realized he had adjustments to make. He apologized to a few people in the industry he felt he’d treated badly and decided not to take on work he’d sabotage, then recommitted to his own course, as he had always done. “I’m not finished offending people,” he said. “I’ll be an unedited racist, unedited sexist, piece of garbage till I die.”

The respect of other comedians had sustained him during the difficult times: “They’ll tell the truth. Even if they don’t like me as a person, my worst enemy won’t say I suck as a comic.” But he had plenty to say about comedians who cared more about being liked than committing to their particular point of view: “Do you have a life philosophy? Do you have anything that says goddamn ethic? Any ethic, you piece of shit? If you don’t, don’t talk to me. I don’t even have to say sheep.”

O’Neal was also trying to reconnect with the purity of his early years in stand-up—when the crowd wasn’t the means to some bigger end but a group of other human beings in the room. “I am trying to work my way through all these obstacles to get back to the audience,” he said.

By 2011, O’Neal’s new approach was bearing fruit: He finally taped a Comedy Central hour, which he promoted on Jimmy Fallon’s show—his first network appearance in four years. He also recorded his first CD. The business was changing, slightly, too—evidenced by FX’s partnership with Louis C.K. John Landgraf, the network’s president, during his first meeting with O’Neal, gave him a development deal on the spot. “I didn’t want to cast Patrice in a sitcom,” said Landgraf. “I wanted to create The Patrice O’Neal Show. It took him a while to believe we meant it.” FX didn’t bail after O’Neal rejected their first script. Perhaps equally significant, Patrice didn’t bail when they passed on the draft he and Gino Tomac came up with.

But if O’Neal’s star was rising again, his health, which had never been good, was in jeopardy. He tried juicing and being a vegan, but could not lose the weight. Vondecarlo regularly woke during the night to check that he was breathing. He spoke to his friends of losing interest in sex, and of the fear of losing her because of it. “I’m 40,” he’d said onstage, “and that’s young in everyone-else years, but in black years—high blood pressure, diabetes—if you did a black-to-white-life ratio, I’m a 177-year-old.”

The Comedy Central roasts are cheesy, pretaped affairs with a mixture of top-flight comics, hacks, and faltering celebrities, but they can substantially boost a comic’s visibility. Patrice hadn’t done one since the salad days of Tough Crowd; he wasn’t interested in roasting people he didn’t know. But that summer, O’Neal agreed to do the Charlie Sheen roast because he respected Sheen for going against the machine, and he wanted to tell him in the way that held the most meaning for him—face-to-face.

No one liked to follow Patrice, so he was last in the lineup, as usual. When the moment finally came for O’Neal to perform, the comedians watching understood what it meant when he looked at his set list and shook his head. Patrice was going to be Patrice again—this time in front of millions of viewers. By the time he got up to speak, he had been in the room for three hours and had to address what was actually going on.

“I had all this planned shit, but I didn’t know William Shatner was going to be a quasi—like an old racist man,” he started, each insult bringing with it another nuance of his take on the differences between celebrity and true performance: He bemoaned the fact that Mike Tyson no longer scared white people; ridiculed Jackass’s Steve-O’s cynical use of his own recovery; and sent Anthony Jeselnik, an up-and-comer, back to his booster seat. “He had to go from his guts,” recalled Robert Kelly, amped up all over again by the memory of how well Patrice had done. “You take away the script from any other comic—take away the piece of paper—they’re finished! They’re you! They are anybody else!”

It’s one of the highs that stand-up can deliver—making the most of what you’ve been given, bringing it to bear in the here and now, and showing people what you’ve got—which, for Patrice, was the searing need for people to own up to themselves. Even in the edited version that aired, the shock in the room is palpable. Patrice was incredulous. “How can I be too mean after all this shit?” he asked. In Patrice’s view, brutal honesty was a form of love, and roasting as close as comedy got to Utopia. How could the audience not be grateful for the gift of it? A lot of the evening’s earlier insults hadn’t even been true.

Everyone agreed that Patrice had killed; he was pleased but not surprised. “What I been practicing my whole life is to be okay in the moment of possible failure,” he said after the show aired. “I came through, for myself.”

William Shatner later told me that after the taping, he and his wife ran into Patrice at the garage and talked about his diabetes as they waited for the valet. “It was a strange place to have a conversation about life and death,” Shatner said, “but it was presaged by his clarity at the roast.”

Shatner and his wife reminded him that diabetes wasn’t like cancer and there were things he could do to save himself. Patrice was moved—these two old white people sharing their knowledge. At the end of the conversation, the three of them cried. “He knew that he was dying, that he was a dying man, and in a way, he wanted to die,” said Shatner. “That’s what I saw. That’s why we cried.”

In the last interview he ever did, weeks before the stroke that eventually killed him, O’Neal spoke to fellow comedian Jay Mohr about the business, which was playing heavily on his mind again. His special hadn’t changed anything much, and the heat from the roast hadn’t been transformative, other than helping him finally sell out a weekend at Carolines. He had another meeting with FX—now about an animated series, but the project that most appealed to him was one that required his friends coming to him—to his condo in New Jersey, where he would interview them. Mohr urged him to agree to the next roast, but O’Neal knew the moment was singular and that it was done. What about a podcast? Patrice didn’t want to communicate in a virtual reality. He needed the audience’s energy. “I’m dying inside,” he told Mohr. “But never onstage.”

Mr. P, the only live album O’Neal ever recorded, took place at the DC Improv on a Friday night in the spring of 2011 and was released this February, two months after his death. Many working comics believe it will rank as one of the top 25 comedy albums of all time. He loved performing in D.C., where people heard about the show the way he most respected—by word-of-mouth. If, as O’Neal said, what fed your integrity was your journey to find your people, he found them that night at the Improv.

Melba Davis, the manager of the club, was there; she scheduled herself to work whenever Patrice performed. She loved talking to him backstage and watching him continue the conversation onstage—whether he was chiding her for not having sex while she still could, or taunting the women at the front table, who were acting like they didn’t need men. “His how-dare-he was exciting,” she said. “He demanded you go with him.”

But O’Neal believed that he was only as good as the crowd made him, and that night, they were willing to be taken as far as he wanted to go. On the CD, the laughter keeps getting louder, and Patrice’s own laugh is as loud as anyone’s. After a gorgeous bit on revolutionary leaders, he discovers that a young black man in the crowd is named Tolu: You can feel the terrible thrill move through the audience at what’s coming next—O’Neal seizing the reveal, hilariously and mercilessly riffing on the burden of an African name that’s been chosen by somebody else. It’s a spontaneous moment, full of anger and love, and as close as you can get to the conversation you never had with the comedian Patrice Lumumba Malcolm O’Neal.

This possibility of communion is what live stand-up gave back to Patrice. He’d explained it to Mohr this way: “The audience has to give when they are in the crowd. When I do shows and I see you, I know that you’re giving. Even if you’re not giving, I’m going to fucking see you.”

RealFreeMarket.org: Annoying Webforms

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:00:39 +0000

When applying for jobs, many corporations make you fill out a webform first. They all seem to use the same software, with the same bugs.

They ask you to fill out “country”, and select from a listbox. Instead of making “USA” the default option, they make you scroll all the way down to the ‘U’s and pick “USA”. Every website has this bug.

Why not make USA the first choice? Or, look at my IP address and fill it out by default?

RealFreeMarket.org: Reader Mail – 05/06/2012 To 05/12/2012

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:00:35 +0000

Note: Due to a defect in the rawr plugin, the formatting for this post shows up wrong on the blog homepage, but it does show up correctly if you view it as a single post or in a RSS reader.

David Z commented on About FSK.

Hey FSK I just sent you an email with a question. Wanted to leavea comment here just in case you don't check your email regularly.

I stopped reading the old fsk2006@gmail.com. I've been considering setting up gmail on my realfreemarket.org domain, but didn't get around to it yet.

I'll make my answer a post also.

Dave Edelhart commented on node.js Is VB6 - Does node.js Suck?.

I can't see a single thing to suggest that the author actually TRIED Node.js. Regardless of the outcome, your method is to paste theory onto theory. You are "Thinking about" something which is easily testable. There is a reason they don't give degrees in "Computer Philosophy".

Richard commented on node.js Is VB6 - Does node.js Suck?.

While it does seem like you might've dealt with some idiots in the situation you described in your article, I don't think your conclusion about node.js is very fair.

When I write web applications I usually use PHP. I have a lot of experience with PHP so I can write decent scripts quickly and easily. I'm sure there are valid criticisms of PHP, but many of them (there are too many function aliases! it's sloppy! etc) are irrelevant to somebody who knows the language.

I recently started working at a new job with a team that's making use of node.js for some of their web applications. Since I barely even knew what it was before I started, I've spent the last few days researching and learning to use node. I was, like you, skeptical of node at first, but closer inspection and further acquaintance has shown that it is actually a nifty piece of software.

For people used to developing in PHP, node might take some time getting used to. It's been a little frustrating at times. But contrary to what you might've said, node is actually very powerful. It has very high performance, rivaled mainly by C/C++ and Java (yes, Java isn't the slow piece of shit it used to be nowadays). In fact, the company I work for uses it precisely for this reason and also because it allows for rapid development. Better yet, you can actually incorporate C or C++ code into your node scripts, which opens the door to capabilities that might not be attainable using javascript solely. As for your comparison of node to VB6, I can tell you that node is cleaner and more sophisticated than VB6 was. A shitty amateur who could poorly write node-based scripts that work could also write shitty PHP or ASP scripts.

I can only encourage you to avoid assumptions and sweeping generalities. While it is true that staunch proponents of certain technologies can often be ignorant nutjobs, the fact that there are node evangelists doesn't mean that node itself is bad. Try node out for yourself, should you desire, and rid yourself of these preconceived notions, lest you stoop to the level of the uninformed "psychopaths" you so enthusiastically denounce.

Those specific people were doing it wrong. They described their product to me, and I know I could have built it by myself in a month. It took them more than 4 months, and their website isn't that great.

I was involved in a Rails disaster. They weren't using Rails correctly, and Rails was unsuitable for that project, and Rails itself is a POS. I researched node.js, and it reminded me a lot of Rails. There was a lot of hype, but not so much in terms of useful documentation. For example, the php.net website is much easier to use and search, compared to anything I found for Rails or node.js.

As a practical matter, I can refuse all Rails and node.js interviews, and there still will be plenty of other jobs. I briefly researched node.js, and concluded I didn't like it. Some of the comments here are really hostile, which is interesting. I just wrote a summary of that interview and my conclusions after briefly researching node.js.

Some people are evil. An evil person would say that I'm evil. I'm confident that I'm mostly in tune with the truth now. That's why Rails and node.js are popular even though they suck. They are attractive to evil people, who evaluate based on hype and not technical merit. That's also why people are so hostile. If you're running a scam, you're very hostile to people who question your scam.

cogitansiuvenis commented on Real Money!.

It's funny. I have a special needs uncle that loves coins, his favotires where junk silver, wheat pennies, and war nickles. I remember my grandmother saying that he started collecting them the moment the government stopped minting them. Every silver coin he found he kept, and he would go to the bank every week to get rolls of quarters, nickels and dimes go through them and remove the junk silver. At the time late 60s and early 70s, people would give him weird looks and just attribute it to his 'condition'. The joke ended up being on them. He did this for nearly every week for forty years and when we went through his bags, and I mean dozens of bags, of junk silver coins and it turns out he had something on the order of 10-15 grand worth that he had amassed.

10-15 grand face amount, or fair market value?

Someone estimated that he made about $5/hr (tax-free!) going through bags of pennies and picking out the pre-1982 ones.

It's a more effective use of my time to get a regular job and buy silver, than look through bags of coins.

The interesting bit is that I can usually immediately recognize junk silver! I get 1-2 pieces per year. That was my first quarter. I got a few war nickels and a couple of dimes.

Justin commented on Trademark Foolishness - "Ball So Hard University".

A trademark lasts forever, but its conditional on you legally attacking people using what is trademarked. If you don't you lose it.

That's also true for copyright. If you don't enforce it aggressively, a court may rule you abandoned it.

That's one really offensive bit about State law. Copyright law and trademark law force "owners" to aggressively go after every infringement, no matter how minor.

Anonymous Coward commented on Annoying Windows UI Flaw.

If you were a real man you would use FreeBSD and not Windoze.

Justin commented on Annoying Windows UI Flaw.

I once moved our entire 8gb source tree, complete with branches and tags. Thanks windows.

commented on Annoying Windows UI Flaw.

Ctrl + Z FTW!!!

That doesn't always work. You may not notice the files got moved accidentally, and moved on to other things.

cogitansiuvenis commented on Disposable Phone.

I was just thinking about this the other. More and more consumer items are built, or rather, engineered to fail. They are designed to last only as long as the next product cycle, or when the companies legal obligation ends. Just look at housing today. I currently rent out an old house that was built at the turn of the last century, it creaks and groans, but the beams are strong and the walls are thick. The house was built to last a long time. We've made amazing advances in technology, and one of them was the ability to use engineering to improve the structural design of buildings. However, rather than couple these new innovations with time tested material they pair these new methods with cheaper materials. I've seen houses built only a few years ago that would not last a decade without extensive retrofiting and constant maitennance.

It's a symptom of a corrupt economy.

In a free market, if X makes a lousy product but Y makes a great long-lasting product, then X loses customers to Y.

If you have a monopoly, you maximize your profit by making a product that breaks after a certain time. If you build a car that lasts 20 years, you only sell 1 car every 20 years. If you build a car that lasts 5 years, then you sell 4x as many cars and make 4x the profit.

Suppose that you used to make a great product, but now make garbage. People remember that it used to be good, and still buy from you. The State restricts competition. Someone else can't say "Hey! He's making a lousy product! I'll compete with him!" For example, the auto industry is so inefficient. Why don't a group of clever college kids start a new car manufacturing business? The answer is "regulations and State restriction of the market".

The State has removed the "market penalty" for making a lousy product. Therefore, most corporations have lousy quality.

Anonymous Coward commented on JP Morgan Chase, The "London Whale", "Voldemort", And A $2B Loss.

Mark Knopfler wrote the song "Money For Nothing".

Its title seems to concisely summarize your post.

Anonymous Coward commented on JP Morgan Chase, The "London Whale", "Voldemort", And A $2B Loss.

Below is the URL of a very, very cool song about other problems with our monetary system and economy. The singer talks about how we are all underpaid and too dependent on bank loans. Also nobody mentions that the solution to high house prices is to lower them, not to think up ways for easier credit.

There is a lot of information in this song that can be missed. There is just one line saying "private banks print the public money". This is an important point. Printing money from thin air causes inflation, which is paid by all workers and savers. So why pay interest to banks, when the whole population pays for the new money?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37eqoYbj1QM

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Schedule For Week 3 [Video Lectures For JEE 2013]

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:53:14 +0000

[The following post was sent as reminder to all uses who subscribed for our course. If you also want to receive newsletter from Eduflix, please register on our website]

We have got a very good response in first two weeks of our program for JEE 2013.

For those who are not aware about this program, we are running free lectures in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics for JEE 2013 on our website. Like any free thing, this program has also some limitations.

We are glad that lot of students are benefitting from this program. We are glad to announce the schedule for Week 3. You can check out the entire schedule on the course web page.

Please visit http://eduflix.tv/courses/target_jee_2013/ to start taking the lectures. And please feel free to write us back with your feedback and suggestions. All the best with your studies!!!

May 14, 2012

Kinematics – Relative Velocity Part 2

Classification Of Elements And Periodicity – Periodicity Part 4

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Trigonometric Ratios For Allied Angles Part 2

May 15, 2012

Kinematics – Relative Velocity Part 3

Classification Of Elements And Periodicity – Periodicity Part 5, Periodicity Part 6

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Problems Based On Trigonometric Identities

May 16, 2012

Kinematics – Relative Velocity Part 4

Classification Of Elements And Periodicity – Periodicity Part 7

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Compound Angles

May 17, 2012

Kinematics – Relative Velocity Part 5

Chemical Bonding And Molecular Structure – Revising Bonds – Ionic And Covalent Bonds Part 1

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Multiple Angles Part 1, Multiple Angles Part 2

May 18, 2012

Kinematics – Projectile Motion Part 1

Chemical Bonding And Molecular Structure – Ionic And Covalent Bonds Part 2

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Multiple Angles Part 3

May 19, 2012

Kinematics – Projectile Motion Part 2, Projectile Motion Part 3, Projectile Motion Part 4

Chemical Bonding And Molecular Structure – Hydrogen Bonding Part 1

Trigonometry And Solutions Of Triangles – Triangles – Sine Rule

Traveled Earth: Our Camino, Your Camino… Our Challenge to You

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:20:33 +0000

Today we begin walking the Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of St. James. Essentially, it is a long walk to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It has been well travelled for thousands of years. While there are many paths to take, the most popular (and the one we’re doing) is the Camino Frances.

Our journey begins in St. Jean Pied de Port, France and continues for some 778 km (this number varies depending on the source) over the Pyrenees mountains and through the north of Spain.

Our path - 778km!

Our reasons behind choosing the Camino are simple. Despite its history, we are not walking it for religious reasons. Rather, we want the challenge and simplicity of travelling solely by foot.

Second, we want to raise awareness and perhaps some money for a good cause. We are firm believers that big changes are necessary in the North American lifestyle.

Thus, we have a challenge for you. As we walk approximately 20-25 kilometres a day for the next 35 or so days, we want you to make a diet or fitness improvement in your life. Start going out for walks. Limit the refined sugars in your diet. Switch from white bread to whole wheat bread. Try to eat a more whole foods, plant-based diet (we’re not suggesting you turn vegetarian here, just add more plants and whole grains). Watch a documentary or two about where your food comes from. Join a recreational sports team. Grab and a friend and sign up for a half-marathon. Whatever you do, make it personal, make it count and stick to it. We guarantee you’ll feel better!

In conjunction with this personal challenge to you, we’re going to try to raise $800 for the Canadian Diabetes Association – about one dollar for every kilometre we will walk. Type 2 diabetes is very much a lifestyle disease, and we have a very personal connection to diabetes… several of our family members are diabetic. We have already donated $80 to kick-start the fundraiser… now we need your help to reach our goal. If you are interested in donating a few dollars or even quite a few, you can do so here:

Our Diabetes Fundraiser Page – $800 in 800 km or more!

We hope you take us up on our challenges. We’ll be tracking our progress (both distance and money raised) with weekly updates on the Camino. We’d love to hear about your efforts too!

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: My Notes from Open Source System Management Conference 2012

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:06:33 +0000

Even this year I was in Bolzano (Italy) for the annual conference organized by Wuerth-Phoenix on Monitoring with Open Source products.

I found the conference very interesting, with speakers from around the world that have described several open source products and best practices on monitoring but also on configuration and management tools. A big surprise for me has been the strong push for alternatives softwares to Nagios for monitoring in particular Shinken and Icinga have received many praise.

But before I give some more details about the presentations a few words about the company that has hosted about 400 people in their, free of charge, event, Wuerth-Phoenix manufactures and markets an appliance called NetEye, within there are many Open source products including:

Nagios Core, with many preinstalled plugins, Cacti, ocsinventory, GLPI, NfSen, Nedi, and DocuWiki the highest level version has also OTRS, all these software are integrated with some web management interface developed by Wuerth-Phoenix itself.

After the greetings from the organizers the speakers have started with their talks, the slides are already online (compliments!) So if some description of the talks seem interesting, you can take an in-depth on the subjects with the original slides.

These are the talks that have impressed me more:

First talk:
Olivier Jan, Founder of the French Monitoring Community (F)

One of the most interesting talks in my opinion, Olivier has presented the tools that he thought might be the future of monitoring, the first consideration is that the cloud is increasing exponentially the number of hosts and services to monitor which thus requires a scalable monitoring solution, he sees two possible solutions for this problem:

Icinga installed with Mod_gearman an event broker (this also works with Nagios) that allow to scale horizontally the number of servers running the check, while maintaining a single central server management.

Or an alternative software created to make this task: Shinken, this software is born a few years ago with the idea to make a monitoring solution compatible with the cloud, with distinct elements that can be replicated and multiply, and so is possible to raise the number of checks really easily and without any loss in performance.

After that Olivier has talked about monitoring the end user experience, so not just the state of single ICT servers but browsing a complete website and check some outputs, the suggested tools for this tasks are:

Cucumber
Watir Webdriver
Sikuli

I never heard of these software, so I must definitely study them, thanks Olivier.

Another interesting aspect of his talk has been regarding the managment of the logs, for this task Olivier suggest 2 tools:

1Logstash

This is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.

Some of the features are:

Various inputs (AMQP, Syslog, TCP, XMPP, file, Twitter…)
Filters and rewrites (date, grep, gelfify, grok…)
Various outputs (AMQP, websockets, Nagios, XMPP, MongoDB…)
Can act as a collection daemon, transport agent as well as a pre or post log filter

2 graylog2

Graylog2 is an open source log management solution that stores your logs in ElasticSearch. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP, UDP or AMQP and stores it in the database. The second part is a web interface that allows you to manage the log messages from your web browser.

Features:

Syslog daemon with extended possibilities (AMQP, GELF…)
Web interface to interact in real-time with logs
Elastic Search backend
MongoDB for prefs
Streams
Blacklists
Alerts (mail, Nagios)

These are some of the things i liked more but Olivier has talked also of other interesting software, check his slides for more info.

Second talk
Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst Forrester Research (US)

Before the start I was thinking that a talk from an analyst would be really boring…i could not be more wrong !
Jeffrey has illustrated some interesting information on the adoption of Open source on big company, tracing in the 2009 the year when OS has “crossed the chasm”, becoming the most important part of the software in most of the biggest company.
A number that i remember is that 80% of the company use OS software in some of their phases (development, testing, desktop, server, etc.)

After this first information he has applied his analyst experience on evaluating some open source monitoring tools, taking in counts things like: number of developers, number of commit per month, how the code is commented, user rating and other aspects.
He has presented these information for the most famous monitoring software tools, and to make it short:

OS monitoring software on the raise: Cacti, Shinkend and Icinga
OS monitoring software going down : Zenoss, Hyperic HQ and Groundwork

As usual check his slides for more information.

Third talk:
Bernd Erk, Managing Director NETWAYS GmbH (GER)

This has been another great talk with the presentation of many interesting Open source software, the only bad thing for Bernd is that some of the software were also present in the first talk of the day.

Erk has presented the software starting from the ITIL Lifecycle, so presenting different Open Source software for any phase:

This is the list of software suggested for every phase:

Capacity Management – Tools

Independent Tools

Cacti
Munin
Graphite

• Nagios/Icinga Addons

PNP4Nagios
inGraph

Of these i want to take a look at ingraph a software developed by netways.org

Availability Management – Tools

Business Process addon for icinga/Nagios

Deployment Management Tool

Puppet

Incident Management Tool

Request Tracker by BestPractical

Problem management Tools

Jasper
Pentaho
Birt

Personally I must say that these 3 were the presentations that impressed me the most, perhaps because i knew very well some of the things in other talks, or I’ve already seen them in other events.

I advise you to look also at the slides of the talks:

Luca Deri, Founder ntop (I)
Getting more Information on your Network Performance

Talk where he presented the new tools for the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) developed by him and his team and integrated into an appliance that can be used to monitor application-level flows used by users of a network.

Jimmy Conner, Cacti Plugin Architecture (US)
10 Year of Cacti – The latest Evolution of the new Plugins

In this talk Jimmy has presented the status for the Cacti project and some of the most commonly used plugins.

Michael Schwartzkopff, Consultant for high availability systems and network management (SWI)
Network Discovery with NeDi

A speech dedicated to the product NEDI, an open source software that can do the scan of the whole network, gather information about our equipment and report changes in the state of the network.

Conclusions

It’s been a great event, my compliments to all the speakers and to Wuerth-Phoenix for the organization, there were around 400 people following the talks, and I’ve enjoyed talking with them at the lunch, i hope to see you next year.

No related posts.

RealFreeMarket.org: Robert Caro And Lyndon Johnson Propaganda

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:00:01 +0000

Robert Caro was on Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show. He was promoting his book, a biography about Lyndon Johnson. He won two Pulitzer prizes. One was for his work on Lyndon Johnson. The other was for work on Robert Moses, a politician in NYC.

When a “journalist” writes about politicians, he’s writing propaganda for the State. Then, Robert Caro gets a Pulitzer prize, reinforcing that it’s a good career move to write propaganda.

Robert Caro is saying “Isn’t it wonderful that we have these great leaders to make all our decisions for us!” rather than “They’re a bunch of criminals!”

He was writing about some of the nasty things Lyndon Johnson did. However, he was extremely negligent, to not mention “Lyndon Johnson might have organized Kennedy’s assassination.” He briefly indirectly mentioned that point and ridiculed it.

It’s pretty obvious that his book is complete propaganda and nonfiction. The book is otherwise factually accurate, but doesn’t discuss the most important thing that Lyndon Johnson did. In fact, Bobby Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy probably suspected he organized the murder, which explains why they were so hostile towards him.

It’s dishonest to write about Lyndon Johnson, without seriously discussing “He might have organized Kennedy’s murder!” It reminded me a lot of the Pat Tillman book, where the author didn’t mention that Pat Tillman may have been assassinated.

There’s another important point regarding the Kennedy assassination. Most people argue about details of the bullet that killed him. It is much more important to ask “Why was Kennedy killed?” He wanted to end the war in Vietnam, knowing it was a boondoggle and a huge profit for military contractors. He wanted to reign in the CIA. Most importantly, he realized that the Federal Reserve was evil and was challenging the banksters.

Whenever you see State “journalism”, it’s important to ask “What’s the propaganda?” In this case, it was pretty obvious. Robert Caro is helping cover up Lyndon Johnson’s role in murdering President Kennedy. He wrote a book that is otherwise 100% factually correct, but omits something very important. By writing a book that’s 100% correct except for an important omission, that helps cover up the big lie. Robert Caro probably really believes that President Johnson didn’t organize the assassination, which helps make him a more effective liar.

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Final Decision About JEE Likely On May 28

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:40:47 +0000

The dilemma over the new format for entrance exam does not seem to end. It was February 14, we we published the post about ISEET replacing JEE (ISEET to replace JEE) and we it has been 3 months and almost 23 updates to that post. And there no clarity yet.

The latest news is that the meeting held on saturday between MHRD and IIT senates went inclusive. The senates from 6 older IITs are not in favor of common entrance test as proposed by MHRD.

Now, the MHRD and Councils of IIT and NIT will hold a joint meeting on May 28 to take a final decision on the entrance exam. However, from our past experience with earlier announcements (eg. Final Decision on IIT JEE in April), we do not have much hopes whether we will really have final announcement on May 28.

What do you think? Will be have the final decision about this on May 28? What do you think the new pattern will be like? Will IIT Senates succumb to MHRD proposals? When with this come into effect? 2013 or 2014? Please drop in your comments.

etbe - Russel Coker: What I REALLY Want from the NBN

Sun, 13 May 2012 08:13:22 +0000

Generally I haven’t had a positive attitude towards the NBN. It doesn’t seem likely to fulfill the claims of commercial success and would be a really bad thing to privatise anyway. Also it hasn’t seemed to offer any great benefits either. The claim that it will enable lots of new technical developments which we can’t even imagine yet that aren’t possible with 25Mb/s ADSL but which also don’t require more than the 100Mb/s speed of the NBN never convinced me.

But one thing it could really do well is to give better Internet access in remote areas. Ideally with static or near-static IPv6 addresses (because we have already run out of IPv4 addresses). Currently 3G networks do all sorts of nasty NAT things to deal with the lack of IPv4 addresses which causes a lot of needless pain if you have a server connected via 3G. One of the NBN plans is for wireless net access to remote homes, with some sanity among the people designing the network such NBN connections would all have static IPv6 subnets as long as they don’t move.

I’m currently working on a project that involves servers on 3G links. I don’t have a lot of options on implementation due to hardware and software constraints. So if the ISPs using the NBN and the NBN itself (for the wireless part) could just give us all IPv6 static ranges then lots of problems would be solved.

Of course I don’t have high hopes for this. One of the many ways that the NBN has been messed up is in allowing the provision of lower speed connections. As having an ADSL2+ speed NBN connection is the cheapest option a lot of people will choose it. Therefore the organisations providing services will have to do so with the expectation that most NBN customers have ADSL2+ speed and thus they won’t provide services to take advantage of higher speeds.

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A Few Guys Coding: StegaGram

Sun, 13 May 2012 05:26:32 +0000

Everyone knows — or at least everyone SHOULD know — that email is not a secure form of communication. It’s a lot like yelling across a parking lot. Your message is sent “in the clear” along most of the connections that lie between you and the recipient. For the times when you want to send a message that does NOT stand out in the open for others to read, StegaGram is your answer.

Double Armor
StegaGram protects your communication in two ways. First, it locks the message so that it can only be read by the person to whom you’re sending the message. Then, it hides the locked message inside a picture, so that it doesn’t even look like a locked message is being sent. As an analogy, consider keeping your valuables in a strong safe, located in your front yard. It’s a great safe, but why invite attention to the fact that you have it? Using StegaGram is like keeping that strong safe hidden in a secret panel behind a picture in your house.

No Password, No Problem
Short passwords are not very secure because they can be quickly guessed by computer programs. Long passwords are better, but can be hard to remember. We chose to avoid these problems altogether by using long strings of random numbers, known as keys. If you want more details you can read more below. Otherwise, suffice it to say that it’s stronger than a password but you don’t need to remember anything. You just need to pass a key to your friend using a QR Code — those barcode-looking squares you see all over the place.

Under the Hood
You know those cars that look cool from the outside but lack actual power and performance when driving? Yeah, that’s not us. StegaGram is clean and easy to use, but also employs the latest methods of cryptography and steganography. In fact, our initial version was denied for public distribution because it was too strong. We had to tone it down a bit. As for our hiding methods, they don’t just avoid detection by the human eye. We use a technique that passes well under the radar of digital analysis programs which search for anomalies in histograms.

For the Nerds
StegaGram uses a combination of asymmetric cryptography and an optimized version of the Graph-Theoretic approach to steganography. The asymmetry of the cryptographic keys allows for a distributed authentication model, similar to that used in the PGP community. Our initial version uses 2048-bit RSA encryption. As for the key exchange, the QR-Code method prevents the classic ‘Man-in-the-Middle Attack’ used against the Diffe-Helman pattern, because there is no communication over a network during the exchange. In addition, our steganographic algorithm preserves first-order statistics, unlike most other freely-available steganographic software. For more details, take a look through our research paper.

Fine Print
This application was created for academic and recreational purposes, and comes with no guarantees or warrantees for its information protection. It’s pretty burly, as mentioned above, but is used at your own risk. Thank you to Alex Renger for the idea of StegaGram and for the steganographic algorithm. Thank you to Dr. Yue from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs for his teaching and support.

7PHP dot COM - A Mauritian PHP Resource: MySQL + UPDATE SELECT Statement + #1093 – You can’t specify target table for update in FROM clause

Sat, 12 May 2012 23:36:02 +0000

What I Was Trying To Do I needed to do an Update Select using MySQL, I was expecting it to be something like: UPDATE MyTable SET HitCount = ( SELECT sp.HitCount+1 FROM MyTable sp WHERE sp.email = ‘test@email.com’ ) WHERE email = ‘test@email.com’ Error Message I Got Unfortunately, that returned the error message: #1093 – [...]

RealFreeMarket.org: JP Morgan Chase, The “London Whale”, “Voldemort”, And A $2B Loss

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:00:34 +0000

This story was interesting. A trader at JP Morgan Chase lost $2B.

The trader, Bruno Iksil, had amusing nicknames. He was called “The London Whale” or “Voldemort”. That’s interesting, that banksters think “Voldemort” is a cute nickname.

How did he lose $2B? The trader was only supposed to be hedging.

If you hedge, you’re trading huge nominal positions that are supposed to cancel. It’s very tempting to stop hedging, and start making bets. If you’re right, you get to keep the profit. If you’re wrong, you get a bailout.

If Bruno Iksil was running his own small business, there’s no way he would be allowed to take $2B bets. All of JP Morgan’s assets are placed as collateral, for every trader’s bets. This enables traders to borrow cheaply to finance their gambling. This exploits the concept of “too big to fail”.

What was he trading?

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the trader, Bruno Iksil, had been placing bets on an index called “CDX.NA.IG.9″–the largest of a panoply of credit indices produced by data provider Markit.

I’ll translate this into English.

A Credit Default Swap (CDS) is a derivative based on a bond. A CDS is paid off if the bond defaults.

After the Greek restructuring, there was a controversy over what the exact CDS payout should be. A group of banksters who were short a lot of CDSs, voted on what the payout should be. Given that CDS owners got robbed after the Greek restructuring, you’d have to be a fool to buy CDSs.

A CDS is a highly leveraged derivative. For a CDS on $1B of bonds, the premium might be $10M-$50M/year.

That’s the scam AIG’s CDS desk was running. They were selling lots of CDSs. When the economy was booming, they were collecting premiums with no expenses or collateral requirements, making a huge profit. When the economy crashed, they lost a lot of money. However, the CDS traders didn’t have to give back the bonuses they made during the boom. All of AIG was placed as collateral for the CDS trades. That’s the exact same “too big to fail” scam. When AIG was bailed out, the money actually went to Goldman Sachs’ creditors, another classic scam. When Greece was “bailout out”, the money didn’t go to Greece. The money actually went to the banksters who owned Greek bonds.

A CDS on a single bond is a “first-order derivative”. It’s one order removed from a tangible asset, one specific bond on a specific corporation.

The “CDX” index is an index of CDSs. It’s a derivative of a derivative. That’s a 2nd order derivative.

Bruno Iksil was “placing bets on the CDX index”. In other words, he was trading calls and puts and futures on the CDX index. It’s a derivative of the CDX index. It’s a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. That’s a 3rd order derivative.

Summarizing, Bruno Iksil was trading 3rd order derivatives. It’s almost completely removed from tangible assets. He was pretending to be hedging. He was actually gambling.

Why do people trade these things? It comes from the Federal Reserve and negative interest rates. You can borrow at 0% to buy a bond. You can borrow at 0% to buy a CDS, in effect borrowing at 0% to buy something where you borrow at 0%. You can buy futures and options on a CDS index, in effect borrowing at 0% to buy something where you borrow at 0% to buy something where you borrow at 0%. You’re stacking up leverage on top of leverage on top of leverage. It’s all fueled by the Federal Reserve credit monopoly, paper money, inflation, and negative real interest rates.

In most years, Bruno Iksil made profits of $100M. It’s obvious what he was doing. He was using a trading system where the results were “Make $100M 90% of the time, lose $2B 10% of the time.” When you’re using options and derivatives, it’s very easy to do such a thing. It was hidden behind fancy derivatives and calculations, but that’s what he was actually doing.

During that 90% of the time, Bruno Iksil was making a nice salary and bonus. He doesn’t have to give that back, after losing $2B. That’s the “advantage” of gambling with other people’s money.

In effect, some of the TARP bailout money paid for Bruno Iksil and his gambling. If you always get bailed out, why not pursue a system where you make a small profit most of the time, and lose a bundle once in a while? The banksters set up the system that way, on purpose, because that maximizes the amount they can steal.

For example, if you do nothing but sell unhedged way-out-of-the-money calls and puts, you can do that. Most of the time, you’ll collect the premium and make a free profit. Once in awhile you go bankrupt, but you say “Whoops! Mistakes happen!” That isn’t exactly what Bruno Iksil did, because that would be too obvious. It was effectively the same. It was hidden behind a complex series of 3rd order derivative transactions, “hedged” with some 2nd order and 1st order derivative transactions. You can’t hedge perfectly.

Bruno Iksil lost $2B of other people’s money. He was pursuing a system where he made a nice profit most of the time, but once in awhile lost a ton of money. It’s very easy to do that with derivatives.

Bruno Iksil was trading a 3rd order derivative. It was completely removed from tangible assets. It was pure gambling. It had nothing to do with the productive sector of the economy. The official excuse is “Blame Bruno Iksil. He’s just one bad apple.” The real evils are is paper money, inflation, a central bank credit monopoly, and limited liability incorporation. As long as those evils continue, banksters will continue to rob other people. Even if you don’t invest in JP Morgan Chase or bank with them, you’re still financing their theft via inflation and taxes.

There was an amusing conspiracy theory. This loss could have been swept under the rug. It could have been buried off-balance-sheet. This loss was announced to back more complicated regulations. Complicated regulations ultimately benefit banksters and insiders. Unless the Federal Reserve is eliminated, all other banking reforms are smoke and mirrors. The Federal Reserve is one big price-fixing cartel. The Federal Reserve finances all bankster corruption. The Federal Reserve is the underlying reason that banksters earn huge salaries, even though they produce nothing useful and actually destroy wealth.

Alcoholian: Weber-JohnGL Backyard Pizza Oven Prototype Test Drive

Sat, 12 May 2012 15:13:56 +0000

Posted by johngl

It’s actually been a while since I fulfilled my “innovative use of construction materials” calling, but this past week, between much-needed rains, I’ve made up for some of that.

This is the same unit as in my previous post only now it is sporting two coats of black heat-resistant paint:

It’s still not done yet as I still need to mount doors and more pins for racks so I can use it as a large capacity smoker, but it is certainly done enough to make a pizza!

And it did it beautifully even though I wound up adding a layer of pizza stones to mellow the excessive heat.

I thought I’d just see what this baby could do, so I added some wood to the standard load of charcoal. This woody addition shot the temps up an additional 200°F from the original test at 600°F. Yep, when I hit the tiles with my laser thermometer, it read a whopping 836°F. I thought the thermo unit was giving a false reading due to the acute angle at which I was measuring the temp, so I pulled the lid and shot directly at the tile. No substantial change.

Holy Crap! This would burn a pizza on contact (I have experience with this). I quickly scrambled to my stash of quarry tile and put on another layer and closed down all the vents. After a few minutes, the internal temps in the Weber dropped down to 500°F and the “fresh” tiles were absorbing heat nicely. Surface temp on those were 500°F when I popped in the pizza.

Let’s talk pizza for a few moments.

Firstly, my tried, true, and thoroughly tested thin-crust pizza dough recipe can be found in my post: Secrets Revealed. The only thing I’ve changed is that I divided the dough into three sections rather than the usual four. My “new” backyard oven can handle a larger pizza, hence the modification. Also, in recent experiments, I’ve found it’s beneficial to add an additional tablespoon or two of water to that 3/4 cup the recipe specifies, leaving the dough a bit sticky. It picks up the bench flour better and is much easier to work. Feel free to modify the recipe if you’d like; it won’t hurt my feelings one little bit.

This baby barely fits on my larger-sized peel. I’ve already brushed it down with olive oil.

I’ve brushed on the sauce (less is better) added seasonings (a proprietary blend) and two flavoring cheeses: Parmesan (the real stuff) and a lightly-smoked Spanish sheep’s milk cheese called Idiazabal. The latter added just a touch of smoky-tangy goodness.

Pedestrian as it may be, I like pepperoni on my pizza. I use Boar’s Head pepperoni exclusively. I hand cut it in super thin slices, otherwise it leaches too much fat. We get enough of that from the sausage, which I’ll get to in a minute.

I added some Canadian Bacon. Some might call it ham. Canadians call it bacon. I put it on the pizza cuz I was out of prosciutto. Oh, you may have noticed those shards of mozzarella under the pepperoni…a really thin layer there helps hold everything together.

That’s two links of hot Italian sausage. Italian sausage is supposed to be spicy, at least to me, so I always go for the hot rather than the sweet. Choose your own poison.

And finally, the last coat of mozzarella cheese!

A mere five or six minutes later…

The crust came out just slightly burnt on the very outside edges, but the bottom was nicely browned.

It also passed the stiffness test.

And my, was it tasty! It’s something any non-Vegan would appreciate.

I now declare my culvert connector based backyard pizza oven a smashing success! I still need to get a better handle on controlling the temps, but hey, nothings perfect.

Douglas F Shearer: BMBS 2012 Round 1 - Sherwood Pines

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:44:28 +0000

This year Sherwood had a mostly new course on offer for the first round of the British series. Unfortunately it was as flat as the old courses, with minimal technical sections to separate riders, resulting in some very close racing. After the race I was told there was caution arrows on some sections, I never saw these and still think my leg is being pulled.

I was gridded first, so was in the front row with a good chance of staying out of any trouble. Unfortunately there was a big crash in the row behind as the barriers narrowed in the start straight, ending many people’s races very early and resulting in Wheelbase’s Joe Richards having a helicopter ride to the hospital to be checked out (he’s OK, it was just precautionary).

The first section of singletrack came pretty quickly, by which time I was probably down in about 20th due to my lack of power for the start. I sat steady, laughing at riders being too keen to make a pass in inappropriate places, and at those who were now regretting their seriously-slick tyre choices. Once the second lap came round I started to move up places, blasting past people on the one short-step climb on the course, and drafting riders on the forestry roads before sprinting past into the singletrack.

On the last lap I was still making up places, but struggling with some of the elite back markers who were riding some sections a lot slower than I wanted to, especially frustrating with the narrow tree-lined singletrack that makes up the majority of the Sherwood course. The run-in to the finish was tight, with some rooty singletrack and right-angles to negotiate. I managed to pass some more elites on get on the back of a group of three other expert riders but I was outgunned in the sprint by all of them and came in for a rather pleasing tenth place. Not bad for a course that’s not supposed to suit me.

Peter Lieverdink: Value Added Tax?

Sat, 12 May 2012 04:32:36 +0000

A few weeks ago I saw a tweet by the Drupal Assciation asking for feedback on, amongst other things, how it could make being a DA member more attractive. The survey appears to still be open, so if nothing else please go fill it out.

However, before you do so I would draw your attention to question 15:

How much would the following benefits interest you in becoming a Member (or renewing your Membership)?

and in particular one of the options listed there:

"Discounts on software (e.g., something like Adobe)"

When I read that I was flabberghasted. That would effectively mean the Drupal Association subsidising a proprietary software company, helping them to expand their market share. That's not why I use and support an open source project. In fact, I use and support open source software for the completely opposite reason!

Ah, I hear you say, but the Drupal Association has no control over the software project, so this doesn't matter. I beg to disagree. I think this would send a strong signal that the open source philosophy isn't actually an important part of Drupal.

I am amongst the first to admit that there may be a place for proprietary products in the world. In fact, I have an iPhone, which is a completely closed and proprietary device. Some (though not all) designers probably have perfectly valid reasons for needing to use Adobe's software.

However, I very much don't want to be part of an organisation or project that would support these proprietary software companies by providing them with extra sales. Especially not companies that try to sting their customers for as much money as they possibly can.

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Video game lovers listen ! Ubuntu is going to give you some unexpected emotions!

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:50:33 +0000

Article by Giuseppe Sanna

We all know and love Linux and its distributions. Operating Systems that are lightweight, fast, highly customizable, free, advanced … These are just some of the thousands of qualities that our OS Linux have! But as we are also humble users and Linux users … not cocky, we recognize the limits of our sweet penguin, there is a cons we have to remember that this operating system gives to us! Perhaps this is the only … A penalty that surely does not affect all, me for first ! On our beloved Linux Box, in fact, is really difficult to find games with appealing graphics. Maybe you can find some games, but not one of the highest successful video games like GTA, NFS and so on …

At least so far…

All of you who use Linux and love video games are about to discover something amazing …
That’s right! As you may have guessed from the title, some titles of respect are going to get in our machines! Just for some time, in fact, some famous video games producer are starting to notice the huge success of Linux distributions and, as a smart-for-profit corporations they are beginning to direct their thinking towards the scenario of the penguin games! Maybe a few days ago all this would seem a mere myth. But not today …

And in fact recently has been announced by two important games producer to release in a future not so far, a few titles of their works for our Linux Box!
Not everything is as abstract as some think … Indeed it would seem that the two houses, Steam and EA, have even announced the names of some video games. In the WEB In fact, it seems even possible to retrieve a screenshot of “Left4Dead” running on Ubuntu. If Steam has made his move, EA has made a “Raise”! Jono Bacon, in fact, reported in his blog that Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima are about to come in the increasingly used world of Ubuntu.
Another thing near certainty is that these software, unlike the video games for Windows and Mac versions will not be available as box version but only on online store. In this case in the Ubuntu Software Center. Perhaps some will not be happy of this distribution, but if you think at this a bit further you can explore the possibility of having lower prices than the versions for other OS! After all, if you think about it, the videogame producer would save cash on paper and on DVD!

Also we can say goodbye to optical drives ruined by time and not only!
Unfortunately, talking about prices in the same article where I mention Ubuntu disturbs me and surely many of you I bet. But all in all we must also think about, Linux lover, that are willing to pay to buy the games. Of course, these users leave much to be desired in the philosophy of strictly “Open Source”, but we must also understand that it is difficult to repress a passion!

However, criticism or not, I, as a not gamer, I’m really curious to follow this story. A story that will surely be very exciting. Of course, we are just starting … but who knows how this will evolve!

Holy Shmoly: Robot Enrichment

Fri, 11 May 2012 20:35:11 +0000

I just noticed that Portal 2 now has a store where you can modify your robot. I like the way Valve monetize their games. They bring out free DLC, expanding older games with updates and offering them either free (TF2) or at a steep discount. Then they encourage you to buy hats and personalise your character! Nothing like some of the other grind to play free games I’ve played elsewhere.

Two games spring to mind, both free Android games. Samurai vs Zombies and Garfield Defense. Both play in exactly the same way even though they are apparently by different developers. I swear they used the one game engine and just swapped out graphics and sound.

In both games you collect coins to purchase power ups but those purchases are fairly pricey and by the time you get to level 10 you’ll need to grind and play the level 4 or 5 times to get enough coins to buy an upgrade to finish the level.

Still, not a bad way to spend a few minutes while waiting for the bus or something but to be honest I’d rather use my phone to read a book!

I almost forgot to mention the iOS version of Plants vs Zombies. It received a few updates recently which added the ability to plant flowers that reward you with silver and gold. I only tried it briefly but soon discovered that you need to use fertilizer or the plants will wilt. Of course you have to use real money to buy the fertilizer. *sigh*

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Caffeinated: Leaving one, returning to another

Fri, 11 May 2012 20:18:28 +0000

Resigned today from my current position with my employer.

I don't know why I was so nervous, I know exactly why I did it and where I was going next, my former employer. I'm very excited about the move.

However, handing my resignation over to my manager was nerve wracking. I think because I like the guy, but really think his ego and his project are awfully out of sync.

Anyway... the next three weeks will be liberating, if only a little uncomfortable in the transition. The project has a lot of fail written on it and getting away from it is important. So all is good, I remain gainfully employed and I'm going someplace where I'm valued and I know a lot of people.

RealFreeMarket.org: Should You Get A SSN For Your Child?

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:00:50 +0000

By E-Mail, someone asked “Should I get a SSN for my newborn child?”

Some people say “If you don’t have a SSN, then you don’t owe income taxes.” That probably is false, but I don’t know of any specific precedent.

The precedents for income tax trials are pretty clearcut. Judges have consistently said “You’re our slave! We own your labor! No loopholes! No exceptions!” You probably won’t be able to get out of income taxes without a SSN. I don’t know of any specific case. However, all the other “tax protesters” almost always lose. I can’t imagine a “no SSN defense” being any different.

Some people may get away with it. If you’re a small fry and not actively promoting freedom, then it isn’t worth it to crack down on you.

If you don’t have a SSN, you may not be able to claim the child as a dependent on your tax return, but I’m not 100% sure. They use the SSN to prevent two people from claiming the same child as a dependent. This matters if you have on-the-books income.

Without a SSN, you may not be able to get a State driver’s license.

Without a SSN, you may not be able to open a State bank account.

You may not be able to get any on-the-books job.

If you get an on-the-books job and refuse to fill out a W-4, your employer is required to withhold at the highest rate (single no exemptions). However, most employers would fire you for refusing to fill out a W-4, because they don’t want the hassle from the IRS. Without a SSN, you wouldn’t be able to get a refund of the excess withholding.

I’d advise to get the SSN, to avoid the hassle. By refusing to get one at birth, you already probably placed yourself on a “subversive persons” list, if you weren’t already. You might even get a visit from Child Protective Services, for refusing to register your child as State property.

The important point is that you teach your child to not think like a slave. Your child could always start an agorist business and not report the income, even if he does have a SSN. Even though I have a SSN, I still could start an agorist business. I could always go the Mike Gogulski route, and move to another country and renounce my US citizenship.

The good news is that the State probably won’t exist 20 years from now, making it a moot point.

Holy Shmoly: Super Cache for the Weekend

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:23:07 +0000

WP Super Cache 1.0 came out several months ago and while it worked fine for most people there’s always room for improvement and bug fixes. Here are some of the bug fixes and improvements coming in the next version which I plan on releasing next week.

There are a lot of changes there so if you have a self hosted blog I would really appreciate if you download the development version, wp-super-cache.zip and install it in your plugins folder.

Use $_SERVER[ 'SERVER_NAME' ] to create cache directories.
Only create blogs cached directories if valid requests and blogs exist.
Only clear current blog’s cache files if navigation menu is modified
Added clean_post_cache action to clear cache on post actions
Removed garbage collection details on Contents tab
Added wp_cache_check_mobile cacheaction filter to shortcircuit mobile device check.
Don’t delete cache files for draft posts
Added action on wp_trash_post to clear the cache when trashed posts are deleted
Show a warning when 304 browser caching is disabled (because mod_rewrite caching is on)
New check for safe mode if using less that PHP 5.3.0
Added wp_supercache_remove_cookies filter to disable anonymous browsing mode.
Fixed garbage collection schedule dropdown
Fixed preload problem clearing site’s cache on “page on front” sites.
Fix for PHP variable not defined warnings
Fixed problem refreshing cache when comments made as siteurl() sometimes didn’t work
Preloading of taxonomies is now optional
Domain mapping fixes.
Better support for https sites. Remove https:// to get cache paths.
Added AddDefaultCharset .htaccess rule back in and added an option to remove it if required.
Added multisite plugin that adds a “Cached” column to Network->Sites to disable caching on a per site basis.
Added WPTouch plugin to modify browser and prefix list in mobile detection code. Added support for that plugin’s exclude list.
Fixed cache tester
Filter the tags that are used to detect end-of-page using the wp_cache_eof_tags filter.

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In Photos: A Peaceful Tree in Iceland

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:16:26 +0000

A tree wrapped in a woven covering with the peace sign on it in Reykjavik. Anyone know the story behind it?

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Holy Shmoly: Puny god!

Thu, 10 May 2012 21:30:50 +0000

Thanks IrishTek

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Alcoholian: Weber-JohnGL “Dragon” Pizza Oven Prototype

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:03:21 +0000

Posted by johngl

It was just over a year ago that I picked up and assembled my extra large Big Green Egg. One of the primary considerations in my decision was my plan to use it as a pizza oven. I’ve made a bunch of pizzas on the Egg, but it really isn’t a natural thing. There is just too much faith involved. I have to trust that the pizza isn’t burning because I can’t see inside. In addition, the very high heat involved in making pizza positively roasted the Egg’s felt seal and I wound up replacing it (no small feat) in less than two months.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Egg…though not necessarily for pizza.

Strangely enough, just over two years ago, I picked up a 26.75″ Weber Kettle in a step to avoid spending the massive quantities of money on the Big Green Egg.

Fail.

I now introduce to you, the Weber-JohnGL 26.75″ “Dragon” Pizza Oven Prototype: DPO1.

I “manufactured” that center insert in about two hours. And no, it’s not done yet. It’s a prototype.

This all came about when some friends and I started discussing grills while consuming wine, pork, and salmon. Someone asked me how many grills I had.

“Seven.”

After an appropriate pause, we began discussing the merits and shortcomings of the various units in my collection.

So, a couple of days ago, I wandered into McCoy’s Lumber in Manchaca, TX. Locals pronounce that as man-shack. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, I was in there looking for some trim. Uhhh…baseboard, not the other kind of trim. Specifically, I was looking for some baseboard that matched the baseboard in my house. I’d checked the usual suspects, Lowe’s & Home Depot, to no avail. McCoy’s didn’t have it either. However…

they did have this thing — a 24″ culvert connector — that caught my attention from clear across the parking lot. I thought it was just a short section of culvert. To be honest, metal culvert pipe always seems to get my attention. It’s shiny, heavy, and has cool spirals — and I used to put in culverts a lot when I was building houses (about three lifetimes ago). These days I’m not a general contractor, but culvert pipe is still great for planters and table bases.

Hmmm. Could I use this to modify my Weber? It was a mere $40. I bit.

Okay, so, notice those big metal tabs welded to the side of this sucker? There are big bolts that fit through the holes that cinch it up tightly against the two ends of culvert pipe that this thing joins together. Yeah, well, I didn’t need those, so I cut them off.

I’d initially thought I was going to use this fitting on my 22.5″ Weber Kettle. That came to an end when I eyeballed the larger Weber. Turns out I didn’t have to adjust the size of this thing at all. Well, except for some decidedly minor persuasion that involved the use of a BFH. For the uninitiated, BFH is construction slang for a big f’ing hammer. Persuading something using a BFH isn’t normally a subtle kind of activity. My good friend Alex occasionally is required to use his hands to persuade people off his boat. Pretty much the same kind of thing: Not subtle.

Tabs removed, I pulled apart the two ends and then butted them together. I clamped them using a pair of quick grips. The four holes you see there are to secure some heavy-duty metal strapping to keep things together. I used “grade 8″ bolts since these are going to be exposed to some hefty temperatures as well as the weather and I wanted the threads not to corrode away.

Properly bolted, I did a test fit. Here is where that minor persuasion comes into play and those flared ends proved to be quite handy for these adjustments. The diameter of the culvert connector was just a little large to fit into the base. I therefore used said BFH to repeatedly tappa-tappa the bottom flair inward until it fit just right.

I tapped until it fit snugly, remained stable, and wasn’t difficult to dislodge.

On the top, I used the same technique to force the upper lip outward…

Isn’t that nice?

Now that the thing fit reasonably well, it was time to determine the size of the opening.

I marked the opening using a Sharpie pen.

Luckily, my larger (and long handled) peel fit the opening quite nicely.

All that was left to do was drop in the four bolts that would hold up the grill grate and support the quarry tiles that I use as a pizza stone. I used 1″ bolts for these supports.

Time for fire. I had no idea if the substantial increase in volume, plus the gaping hole in the side, would make the high temps necessary for pizza unattainable.

Using a standard load of charcoal, I fired it up and let it go for a half hour or so.

Here, I’m checking the air temp of what belches out of the Dragon. This long-probe thermometer pegged out at 550°F quite quickly.

The top thermometer was quickly approaching it’s 600°F peg.

In this shot, I’m checking the temperature of the upper lip of the opening. The idea here is that with the top vent closed, the heat and smoke will be forced down over the pizza prior to exiting. The temp here is a good sign.

And here’s the temp of the quarry tile itself. This is just what I wanted and makes for seriously crispy crusts. Again, this was a standard load of charcoal. If I need more heat, increasing isn’t a problem.

So, while I failed at not buying the Big Green Egg, I will be getting some good use out of the Dragon. I’ll give it a coat of heat-resistant paint (1200°F) and figure out how best to close the front so I can use it as a high capacity (though lower temperature) smoker. Further, at about $65 all told (connector, high grade bolts, and paint), it’s a fairly inexpensive modification.

All it needs is a pizza!

Alcoholian: Just a Chicken Sandwich

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:07:20 +0000

Posted by johngl

One of my favorite food things is a chicken sandwich. Not that reconstituted, glued, formed, and neatly sliced stuff, but real chicken. It is one of my favorite pedestrian foods.

For this one, I started with toasted sourdough. The sourdough was then coated with chunky blue cheese salad dressing.

Below, please find the ingredients:

I think you can figure it out from the picture, but for the ingredient impaired, that’s sharp cheddar in the upper left, avocado slices, crispy bacon, fresh-picked-right-from-my-garden tomato (number 2 on the season), kosher dill pickle, and, of course, chicken breast.

Assemble and serve.

That’s it. What more can I say?

I think I’ll have one for lunch!

RealFreeMarket.org: Disposable Phone

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:00:28 +0000

Overall, I like my Droid 3 Android phone. I’ve noticed a new problem. Some of the pixels on the phone are breaking.

Due to the “pentile” design, when a pixel breaks, it leaves a streak on the screen, rather than merely goig black.

I have two broken pixels now. On the other hand, I’m already halfway through my contract and due for a new phone in mid-2013.

That is offensive. The phone’s screen is designed to last only 2 years. After that, people will be trading in for a new phone. It’s a disposable phone.

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: BITSAT more competitive than IIT JEE

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:28:36 +0000

Thanks to increase in number of IITs and number of seats offered by IIT, now entrance exam for IIT has become lesser competitive than BITSAT.

Let us define what is competitive – the number of students attempting the exam for each seat. For example, 5.2 lakh student attempted IIT JEE 2012 for 9,600 total seats. That make 5.2 lakh / 9600 = ~54 students contesting for each seat.

On the other hand, 1.36 lakh students are expected to take the BITSAT-2012 for admission to a total of 2,000 seats. That makes 68 students contesting for one seat.

Here is some more data on competitiveness of various exams -

BITSAT – 68 (2000 seats contested among 1.36 lakh students)

IIT JEE – 54 (9600 seats contested among 5.2 lakh students)

VITEEE (Vellore Institute of Technology) - 48 (3100 seats contested among 1.5 lakh students)

AIEEE – 31 (35000 seats contested among 11 lakh students)

Would be great to get this data for other exams like AIPMT, IAS etc.

Holy Shmoly: BF3 vs TF2

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:59:24 +0000

Who wins when two great games collide?

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Un lugar en el mundo...: Cine en febrero’12

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:31:58 +0000

Hugo (2011) ha sido lo mejor de este mes. No tengo ni idea de donde ha sacado Scorsese este registro, pero me gusta. Se trata de una película casi infantil con un planteamiento casi de cuento y con personajes más cercanos a los de “Amelie” que a los de “Uno de los nuestros”, pero muy entretenida y visualmente impecable. Ya el largo traveling a través de Paris que abre la película te deja con la boca abierta. Constituye, además, un bonito homenaje a los pioneros del cine y, en particular, a Georges Méliès, ese señor del que todos conocemos un único fotograma de su obra. Imperdonable perdérsela.

Lo mejor de No habrá paz para los malvados (2011), como sin duda ya habrás escuchado por ahí, es la impecable actuación de José Coronado como Santos Trinidad. Coronado se consagra de nuevo como un excelente actor y uno de nuestros mejores “malos” de película. Por lo demás, la historia tiene muy poco ritmo y se hace a ratos aburrida y difícil de seguir. Además, la lectura final (si es que la pretende) me resulta incluso desagradable moralmente: ¿Nos quiere decir, acaso, que la lucha contra el terrorismo justifica que existan hijos de puta como este en los cuerpos de seguridad? Pues vaya…

J.Edgar (2011), me ha dejado un poco frío. Es cierto que cometí la imperdonable torpeza de ir a verla doblada y no en versión original, así que no me siento con criterio para juzgar la interpretación de DiCaprio, por ejemplo. Pero aparte de eso, me parece, poco perdonable el escaso protagonismo que reciben algunos secundarios y el nefasto trabajo de caracterización. La historia de este señor, además, me resulta insulsa y nada atractiva. Vamos, que me aburrí un rato y que con esta ya empiezo a pensar que Eastwood ha perdido su toque como director. Al menos en lo que a mi respecta.

Insidious (2010) ha sido la gran decepción del mes. Me habían hablado muy bien de ella y, al final, se trata de una pobre mezcla entre “Polstergeist”, “El exorcista” y “Pesadilla en Elm Street”. Tiene algún buen momento, si, pero no llega a provocar verdadero miedo en ningún momento.

Compártelo:

tychoish: The Limitiations of the GitHub Fork Model

Thu, 10 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Assumption:

git is pretty awesome, but it's conceptually complex. As a result using git demands a preexisting familiarity with git itself or some sort of wrapper to minimize the conceptual overhead.
The collaboration methods (i.e. hosting) provided by git, which are simple by design to allow maximum flexibility, do not provide enough structure to be practically useful. As a result providers like GitHub (and BitBucket and gitorious) offer a valuable service that makes it easier--or even possible--for people to use git.

Caveats:

there are problems with using centralized repository services controlled by third parties, particularly for open source/free software projects.

There are ways that GitHub succeeds an fails in this regard. but this dynamic is too complex to fully investigate within the scope of this post.
If you use GitHub as designed, and the way that most projects use GitHub, then you have a very specific and particular view of how Git works.

While this isn't a bad thing, it's less easy to use git in some more distributed workflows as a result. This isn't GitHub's fault so much as it is an artifact of people not really knowing how git itself works.

Assertion:

GitHub's "fork" model disincentives people from working in "topic" branches.
By making it really easy for people to publish their branches, GitHub disincentives the most productive use of the "git rebase" command that leads to clean and clear histories.
There's no distinction between a "soft fork" where you create a fork for the purpose of submitting a patch (i.e. a "pull request") and a "hard fork," where you actually want to break the relationship with the original project.

This is mostly meaningful in context of the other features that GitHub provides, notably the "Network" chart, and the issue tracker. In a soft-fork that I would intend to merge back in, I'd like the issues to "come with," the repository, or at least connect in some way to the "parent." For hard forks, it might make sense to leave the old issues behind. The same with the network chart, which is incredibly powerful, but it's not great at guessing how your repository relates to the rest of its "social network."

The solution: keep innovating, keep fighting lock-in, and don't let GitHub dictate how you work.

Checkfront: Checkfront Yearbook Submissions

Thu, 10 May 2012 02:17:33 +0000

We have some of the most amazing customers operating businesses in fantastic places around the world. Our customers and their stories are what get us up in the morning and inspires us to build great tools to support them.

As we approach our second birthday in June we would love to capture this time with a yearbook. If you are a Checkfront customer and would like to participate please submit a photo of your business. Ideally a photo of you / your staff operating your business, interacting with a customer, or a stunning photograph of your location. Your photo and business will be debuted on our Facebook page, and made available in a photo collage.

Each submission will go into a draw to win:

A $50 USD Amazon gift certificate.
3 months free service.
A stylish Checkfront hoodie (who doesn't love swag?).

To participate, please e-mail your photo to support@checkfront.com along with the name of your business, website url and short description of what you do. Be sure and like our Facebook page to see submissions and stay up to date.

Notes

Please make sure images are 800x600 pixels are greater. We can scale any high resolution images.

Prizes: 3 months free service to accounts in good standing only based on your existing plan type. Contest to complete June 30th and winners announced in early July. There are three prizes

Photos may be added to the Checkfront Facebook page, and may also be promoted via Twitter, or other social media. You may request at a later date that the photo be removed or replaced.

Also see...

Paul Mellors: Meet the Mark Wallace Studio Audience

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:30:24 +0000

A plea to creativeLIVE! from Josh and Ali on YouTube.

Josh and Ali - @JayLee_Photo

Mark Wallace has selected the students for his Speedlights 101 workshop! Meet the 6 students who will be joining him live in the audience.

Speedlights 101 - May 18 - 20, 2012

Related Courses:

Speedlights 101 with Mark Wallace

In Photos: Phil Oakley on stage

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:48:29 +0000

Phil Oakley of The Human League on stage in Cork last weekend.

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Paul Mellors: JOEL GRIMES: Introduction, Take the Mystery out of Lighting via [FRAMED]

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:00:00 +0000

JOEL GRIMES: Introduction, Take the Mystery out of Lighting. Imagine if an award winning commercial photographer took 16 of his most famous images and sat down with you to teach you the techniques, tell you the story, and share exactly how he lit up those images? THAT is precisely what Joel Grimes is going to do for you. Joel was first introduced to photography his freshman year in

Holy Shmoly: Will swap voice and texts for data

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:59:51 +0000

I hardly ever use up the monthly voice minutes and texts on my phone. Apparently carriers make more and more of their revenue from their customer’s data usage. Glad I’m near wifi most of the day!

What about you?

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TJ Fontaine: Limit access to only Google Maps using Squid

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:34:24 +0000

Recently I needed a small kiosk for some truck drivers to easily use google maps to verify their routes. But I wanted to make sure that's all they were using the kiosk for. I had considered writing my own google maps portal, and I may still yet, but for now I implemented the limitation as an acl in squid.

I can't say this will always work, as it's at google's discretion to change urls and hostnames anytime, but it works for me as of now. I hope someone else finds this information useful.

These are the domains I've allowed so far:

# Primary domains for most traffic
acl GMAPS dstdomain maps.google.com maps.gstatic.com

# Some stock google images come from here
acl GMAPS dstdomain ssl.gstatic.com

# These aren't strictly necessary, but I didn't think it would be harmful to add
acl GMAPS dstdomain safebrowsing.clients.google.com
acl GMAPS dstdomain cache.pack.google.com

# Nearly every query hits this, I couldn't find good information about it
# Some suggest it's related to ads, things work without it but I couldn't
# find a good reason not to include it
acl GMAPS dstdomain id.google.com

# Map Images
acl GMAPSREG dstdom_regex -i ^mt[0-9]+\.google\.com$
# Earth/Satellite images
acl GMAPSREG dstdom_regex -i ^khm[0-9]+\.google\.com$
# Street view
acl GMAPSREG dstdom_regex -i ^cbk[0-9]+\.google\.com$
# Location Images
acl GMAPSREG dstdom_regex -i ^t[0-9]+\.gstatic\.com$

# Printing a map calls the chart api
acl GMAPSURL url_regex -i ^http://www\.google\.com/chart\?

#... further down near the end of the http_access stanzas

http_access allow GMAPS localnet
http_access allow GMAPSREG localnet
http_access allow GMAPSURL localnet

# And finally deny all other access to this proxy
http_access deny all

RealFreeMarket.org: Pointless TSA Screening

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:00:23 +0000

This story was interesting. Police claim they foiled an airplane bomb plot. They found a new type of bomb.

Allegedly, the new bomb would pass through airport security, without being detected. It’s be easy to verify that. Some undercover police could try to take a copy of the bomb through airport security.

The message in the story is “Hooray for the State! We caught a bad guy!”

There’s another conclusion. It’s “All this TSA airport security is for nothing! There’s a new type of bomb that the airport security would miss.”

No matter what security procedures you have, there’s always a loophole. 99.999%+ of airplane passengers are honest. It is offensive to treat everyone like a criminal, just to catch some the rare bad guy.

There are two points to TSA screening. By having lots of security guards wasting their time, that creates the illusion of security and helps stupid people feel safe. Also, TSA screening is an “obeying orders” exercise. It trains people to blindly obey State authority figures. It’s “good” that some people get into fights with TSA guards, because that helps identify subversive people.

One way to spin the story is “Hooray! They caught a bad guy!” The interesting point is “There’s a new type of bomb that can fool airport security. The TSA is one big waste.”

Holy Shmoly: Harness racing on Cork’s roads

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:42:25 +0000

Two harness racers on the Cork to Mallow road defying Garda attempts to stop them and driving against traffic on a very busy road. Crazy guys, crazy.

Peter Lieverdink: Drupal Melbourne Talk: Webform MySQL Views

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:42:35 +0000

These are the resource links for my Webbform MySQL View talk at the meetup on May 8th.

Dealing with unsupported (abandoned) projects Policy: http://drupal.org/node/251466
Abandoned projects: http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=uid:291168

Modules used on the demo site:

webform http://drupal.org/projects/webform
webform_mysql_views http://drupal.org/projects/webform_mysql_views
- data http://drupal.org/projects/data
- elements http://drupal.org/projects/elements
webform_node_element http://drupal.org/projects/webform_node_element
views http://drupal.org/projects/views

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Why Studying Hard Is Not Enough!

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:35:07 +0000

I have seen lot of students asking questions and making statements like these -

“How many hours do we need to study to clear IIT JEE”

“Rohan used to study 9 hours a day for his AIEEE exam”

..and so on. I find it really funny because it reminds me of a situation I studied in Physics many years back. Consider the four situations shown below.

1. A man pushing a block against a wall.

2. A man pushing a block on flat surface

3. A man pushing a block up the slope

4. A man pushing a block down the slope

In all the four conditions, the sketched guy is exerting equal force. In our analogy, a student is putting same level of effort in four different situation.

But would one get similar results in all four cases. No!!

So, working hard is not enough!!

Putting more number of hours to your study is not enough!!

Measuring your progress with wrong metrics is not going to help you. So stop and think. Coming back to our analogy of man pushing the block, he can try out multiple things to get the most word done out of his efforts

- He can try to reduce the friction between the block and the surface

- Pick a surface where gravity helps him

- Never push against a wall

- Avoid vertical pushing against the ground (that will only make the box heavier)

So think how you can make your studies more effective. How you can achieve the same results with half the number of hours you put it or how you can improve your results with the same amount of time.

Always remember: Studying hard is not enough. Start studying smart!

Would love to hear ideas in comments below – how are you making your studies more effective?

Paul Mellors: Jeremy Cowart: Celebrity Photographer and Founder of Help-Portrait by [FRAMED]

Wed, 09 May 2012 05:12:00 +0000

[JEREMY COWART] Celebrity Photography and Founder of Help-Portrait Season 3 Episode 1 We pulled up to his Los Angeles home and was immediately welcomed by a laid-back persona mixed with southern hospitality. Dodging driveway toys and children's bikes then graciously greeted with hugs and hot cocoa, we sat and chatted with a man of talent that ranges far beyond a camera. Jeremy Cowart is

Paul Mellors: GoPro HD Hero 2 Autopsy after a NoseDive

Wed, 09 May 2012 04:59:00 +0000

As stated in the video, we recently had a GoPro HD Hero 2 take a 20ft nose dive. Why not take it apart and see what goes on in there? ;) by LensProToGo

Michael Greb: Migrating Post Tags from Wordpress to Octopress

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:50:05 +0000

I’ve migrated from Wordpress to Octopress and used the Jekyll wordpress migrator to move my posts over. Unfortunately, this doesn’t preserve post tags. The output looks like this:

---
layout: post
title: Devops w/ Perl @ Linode PPW Talk Slides
wordpress_id: 330
wordpress_url: http://michael.thegrebs.com/?p=330
date: 2011-10-27 14:46:31 -04:00
---
Earlier this month I gave a talk about...

Having the wordpress post id means extracting the post tags from the db should be quite easy. First we define our desired output:

---
layout: post
title: Devops w/ Perl @ Linode PPW Talk Slides
wordpress_id: 330
wordpress_url: http://michael.thegrebs.com/?p=330
date: 2011-10-27 14:46:31 -04:00
tags: geek perl slides
---
Earlier this month I gave a talk about ...

The tags field really can appear anywhere in this YAML fragment but I chose to throw it at the end. With 103 posts to loop over, run a query and insert a new line a short script makes sense. The real win for our script though is using the Tie::File module which presents each file as an array with an element for each line.

From there it’s simply a matter of reverse engineering the Wordpress schema to come up with a query that will return a space delimited list of tags for a given post id.

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(t.`name` SEPARATOR " ") FROM `wp_term_relationships` r
INNER JOIN `wp_term_taxonomy` tax ON r.`term_taxonomy_id` = tax.`term_taxonomy_id`
INNER JOIN `wp_terms` t ON tax.`term_id` = t.`term_id`
WHERE r.`object_id` = ?
AND tax.`taxonomy` = "post_tag";

Throw that query in a script that iterates over the list of files and uses Tie::File to add a line to the post and we get:

(word2octo-tags.pl) download

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

use DBI;
use Tie::File;

my $path_to_posts = 'source/_posts';

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:db_name:db_host','db_user','db_pass');

my $get_tags = $dbh->prepare(q{
    SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(t.`name` SEPARATOR " ") FROM `wp_term_relationships` r
    INNER JOIN `wp_term_taxonomy` tax ON r.`term_taxonomy_id` = tax.`term_taxonomy_id`
    INNER JOIN `wp_terms` t ON tax.`term_id` = t.`term_id`
    WHERE r.`object_id` = ?
    AND tax.`taxonomy` = "post_tag";
    });


for my $file (glob "$path_to_posts/*.markdown") {
    say $file;
    add_tags_to_file($file);
}

sub add_tags_to_file {
    my $filename = shift;
    tie my @file, 'Tie::File', $filename or die "No tie: $!";
    my $tags;
    while (my ($rec, $data) = each @file) {
        if ($data =~ m/^wordpress_id: (\d+)$/) {
            $tags = get_tag($1);
        }
        if( $data =~ /^date:/) {
            splice @file, $rec + 1, 0, $tags if $tags;
            return;
        }

    }
}

sub get_tag {
    my $post = shift;
    $get_tags->execute($post);
    my ($tags) = $get_tags->fetchrow_array();
    return "tags: " . $tags if $tags;
}

La Collezione di Anna - Outfits: Yellow Submarine

Tue, 08 May 2012 20:16:26 +0000

{yoogallery src=[/images/stories/jackets/2012/yellowsubmarine] style=[lightbox] }For sale on showgirlsapparel.

SIZE: Extra Small / Small

LinodeBlog: NodeBalancer Concurrent Connections

Tue, 08 May 2012 19:54:08 +0000

When we were figuring out our NodeBalancer pricing model, we decided to make it simple (a philosophy we apply to most decisions) and to not nickel and dime you. And so we announced the NodeBalancer service with a fixed 5,000 concurrent connections limit and a fixed price of $19.95/month.

Today we are pleased to announce NodeBalancer concurrent connections have been increased to 10,000, with no change in price. All existing NodeBalancers have already been seamlessly upgraded, and all new NodeBalacers will get the new limit.

NodeBalancer pricing:

NodeBalancer Instance	$19.95 / mo ($0.027 / hour)
10,000 Concurrent Connections	No charge
Transfer Out	Deducted from Transfer Pool then $0.10 / GB
Transfer In	No charge

If you’d like to know more about how NodeBalancers can help you:

Enjoy!

-Chris

RealFreeMarket.org: Interesting Link – Whitney Music Box

Tue, 08 May 2012 17:00:11 +0000

This was very interesting. Krazydad (Jim Bumgardner) also has interesting puzzles on his webiste.

RealFreeMarket.org: A Common Misconception – 1970s Oil Shortage And Inflation

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:00:48 +0000

I’ve noticed a common error. In the 1970s, there was a gasoline shortage. The “official excuse” is “Those Arabs were angry and the USA, and refusing to sell us oil.” There were long lines and a gasoline shortage.

Shortages never occur in a free market. Instead, prices rise until the shortage disappears.

Here’s what actually happened. There was a price control on gasoline. After the gold standard was completely abandoned, inflation skyrocketed. However, the price control was not changed.

This naturally led to shortages.

The Arabs didn’t sell oil to the USA, because of the price control They could get a better price elsewhere.

The price control law was repealed, and the shortages disappeared.

The “official blame” for the 1970s oil shortage is “Arab Embargo”. That is false. The real reason was a price control and inflation.

The “blame” for price increases is *NEVER* “inflation”. There always is some other excuse.

Planet Linode

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: How to split Varnish log for Virtual host

RealFreeMarket.org: The Fallacy Of Shareholder Lawsuits

Holy Shmoly: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted

Holy Shmoly: Batman Says No

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Changes in the ZorinOS Contest Rules

In Photos: Dungarvan Cakes

Holy Shmoly: The amazing self charging Android phone

RealFreeMarket.org: Cheating At MLB2k12 $1M Perfect Game Contest

The Official Site of Ill Poetic: “Gone” Official Video

Game Development in Epitaph: Computer Games Journal

Holy Shmoly: Welcome to Life

Caffeinated: And now for something completely different... Cufón sux.

Dan Stoner: Do Not Collect Army Ants

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Too many passwords to keep in your mind? Here is a great solution! Cross-platform and portable!

Conclusions

The Official Site of Ill Poetic: Patrice O’Neal NY Magazine Memorium

RealFreeMarket.org: Annoying Webforms

RealFreeMarket.org: Reader Mail – 05/06/2012 To 05/12/2012

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Schedule For Week 3 [Video Lectures For JEE 2013]

Traveled Earth: Our Camino, Your Camino… Our Challenge to You

Our Diabetes Fundraiser Page – $800 in 800 km or more!

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: My Notes from Open Source System Management Conference 2012

First talk: Olivier Jan, Founder of the French Monitoring Community (F)

Second talk Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst Forrester Research (US)

Third talk: Bernd Erk, Managing Director NETWAYS GmbH (GER)

Luca Deri, Founder ntop (I) Getting more Information on your Network Performance

Jimmy Conner, Cacti Plugin Architecture (US) 10 Year of Cacti – The latest Evolution of the new Plugins

Michael Schwartzkopff, Consultant for high availability systems and network management (SWI) Network Discovery with NeDi

Conclusions

RealFreeMarket.org: Robert Caro And Lyndon Johnson Propaganda

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Final Decision About JEE Likely On May 28

etbe - Russel Coker: What I REALLY Want from the NBN

A Few Guys Coding: StegaGram

7PHP dot COM - A Mauritian PHP Resource: MySQL + UPDATE SELECT Statement + #1093 – You can’t specify target table for update in FROM clause

RealFreeMarket.org: JP Morgan Chase, The “London Whale”, “Voldemort”, And A $2B Loss

Alcoholian: Weber-JohnGL Backyard Pizza Oven Prototype Test Drive

Douglas F Shearer: BMBS 2012 Round 1 - Sherwood Pines

Peter Lieverdink: Value Added Tax?

Linuxaria, everything about Linux: Video game lovers listen ! Ubuntu is going to give you some unexpected emotions!

Holy Shmoly: Robot Enrichment

Caffeinated: Leaving one, returning to another

RealFreeMarket.org: Should You Get A SSN For Your Child?

Holy Shmoly: Super Cache for the Weekend

In Photos: A Peaceful Tree in Iceland

Holy Shmoly: Puny god!

Alcoholian: Weber-JohnGL “Dragon” Pizza Oven Prototype

Alcoholian: Just a Chicken Sandwich

RealFreeMarket.org: Disposable Phone

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: BITSAT more competitive than IIT JEE

Holy Shmoly: BF3 vs TF2

Un lugar en el mundo...: Cine en febrero’12

tychoish: The Limitiations of the GitHub Fork Model

Checkfront: Checkfront Yearbook Submissions

Also see...

Paul Mellors: Meet the Mark Wallace Studio Audience

In Photos: Phil Oakley on stage

Paul Mellors: JOEL GRIMES: Introduction, Take the Mystery out of Lighting via [FRAMED]

Holy Shmoly: Will swap voice and texts for data

TJ Fontaine: Limit access to only Google Maps using Squid

RealFreeMarket.org: Pointless TSA Screening

Holy Shmoly: Harness racing on Cork’s roads

Peter Lieverdink: Drupal Melbourne Talk: Webform MySQL Views

Whats Happening at Eduflix.TV: Why Studying Hard Is Not Enough!

Paul Mellors: Jeremy Cowart: Celebrity Photographer and Founder of Help-Portrait by [FRAMED]

Paul Mellors: GoPro HD Hero 2 Autopsy after a NoseDive

Michael Greb: Migrating Post Tags from Wordpress to Octopress

La Collezione di Anna - Outfits: Yellow Submarine

LinodeBlog: NodeBalancer Concurrent Connections

RealFreeMarket.org: Interesting Link – Whitney Music Box

RealFreeMarket.org: A Common Misconception – 1970s Oil Shortage And Inflation

First talk:
Olivier Jan, Founder of the French Monitoring Community (F)

Second talk
Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst Forrester Research (US)

Third talk:
Bernd Erk, Managing Director NETWAYS GmbH (GER)

Luca Deri, Founder ntop (I)
Getting more Information on your Network Performance

Jimmy Conner, Cacti Plugin Architecture (US)
10 Year of Cacti – The latest Evolution of the new Plugins

Michael Schwartzkopff, Consultant for high availability systems and network management (SWI)
Network Discovery with NeDi