December 2003 Archives

I don't have any other plans for New Year's Eve, but there always seems to be some big public festival here in St. Louis to mark the end of the year. This time, it's the kickoff for the city's big celebration of the centennial of the St. Louis World's Fair, so they're holding a massive party in Forest Park. Nobody seems to be excessively concerned about the DHS's Orange Alert, though:

While some cities take extraordinary measures, St. Louis authorities say they'll do little special to protect against terrorist attacks this New Year's Eve. They simply don't consider the Forest Park Ferris Wheel or any of the other area celebrations to be high on the al-Qaida target list.

I might try to get a ride on the ferris wheel, or catch some of the musical performances, but mostly I'm going to see the fireworks.

If you thought Fox had already won the reality-TV race to the bottom, be assured that they aren't resting on their laurels.

Off from work taking a class this week. Hopefully, no one will be shot this time.

I finally went and saw it last night.

*sniff*

Absolutely wonderful.

Update: Vaguely spoilerish commentary added 12/30/03.

You've probably seen the little "USB Key" memory devices that plug right into a computer's USB port, giving instant access to 16-256 MB (or more) of portable storage. Some people have some interesting ideas on how to use these gadgets for much more than data transfer.

The basic USB storage 'dongle' does indeed have a number of obvious uses. Some uses are less obvious however - I have an email application that I can run from the device. It's called nPOPq, and the beauty of it is that it is self-contained - it doesn't use the Windows registry or any external files or directories to run. This means, I can plug my dongle into any Internet-connected computer and check email across all my email accounts, without having to specify them one by one and without relying on an email service provider. I can send email and have it saved to refer to later, and I can copy myself in so that I can save the email properly when I return to the mother ship. This package also provides an address book and it can work with attachments. So, when I travel, I can rely on the fact that I can perform a minimal service even if I have left my computer at home. No doubt there is an IM client, an editor and a basic spreadsheet I could squeeze on, if I really needed, and what about a Java VM...

If that's not enough, the writer mentions a few more possibilities on how these devices could really improve personal computing.

I've been out of playing D&D for too long, and been wishing I could find a way to meet some local gamers so that I could get into a new group. Duh.

For some reason, hunting down spammers and torturing them to death is still illegal. Go figure.

As an alternative, I finally gave in and installed POPFile last night. Ever since I first read Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam, I've been meaning to hunt down and install a Bayesian spam filter. POPFile is a statistics-based automatic e-mail classification program, and said classifying can include recognizing spam and dumping it into its own little oubliette. Eventually, that is; it takes time to learn your particular classification scheme. Once POPFile has classified a sufficient quantity of mail, it's supposed to do a remarkably good job, not only of disposing of spam, but also of sorting your mail in useful ways.

Installing was surprisingly easy, at least on Windows; it's a pretty standard self-extracting installer. I wasn't expecting it to have such an easy time sorting through my mail settings and reconfiguring Outlook Express (I know, I need a real mail client) to pass incoming mail through the filter. I was expecting to have to do a lot more manual configuration. Translating the filtered e-mail into OE's folders required a bit more effort, but didn't take too long.

The difficult part will be training the program; it's going to take a while for me to get enough non-spam e-mail to build a sufficient statistical database to classify things properly. I'll just have to see how it works out over time.

No, I haven't seen it yet. My folks just got into town for their Christmas visit, and I'm waiting for a good time to take Dad to go see it.

Yestarday, I saw a new game down at my FLGS, and decided to take a closer look. The box read: "Ideology: The War of Ideas is an exciting new strategy game by Z-Man Games. During the game, each player symbolizes one of the 20th Century's most powerful Ideologies..." It went on to list the playable ideologies in question: Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Imperialism, and Islamic Fundamentalism. Is it just me, or does something seem missing from that list?

At 4:30 this afternoon, I walked out of a store, raised my face to the sky, shouted, "I'm done! I'm done shopping!", and started cackling maniacally. Hopefully, bystanders were frightened.

And so begins the Wrapping.

Slate has a brief profile of the work of comic book writer Alan Moore today. Not as good as the classic Onion A.V. Club interview, but a nice introduction.

I just thought of a wickedly appropriate present for someone on my Christmas list. I have a relative who is bad about forwarding "urban legend" e-mails to everyone. At least, she used to be; I think I dropped off her mailing list after the third or fourth replay I sent back asking her to check her facts on Snopes. So, why not get her a book on urban legends (probably one of Jan Harold Brunvand's works on the subject)? With any luck, she'll never forgive me.

What have I been doing lately, that I haven't been updating the weblog or anything? Well, let's see.

I spent most of November heads-down working on the pilot of an web application, trying to get it to the point where I could demo it to the people who are going to be using it. The people who sloped off for some emergency when it came time to demo it. Oh, well. Lots of work still to be done on the app when I get back to working on it.

Except, of course, for the day about a week before Thanksgiving that our office lost power for several hours. That day I spent running power cables up and down stairwells so that we could use generators in the basement garage to keep critical company systems on the third floor running. For the second time this year. Readers may be asking, "Why don't you have a more robust backup power system in place? Didn't the last power outage convince the company of the need for an automatic fail-over generator?" Of course it did. Installation was scheduled to start the very next week.

The last week of November, I drove down to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with the parents. I've never been big on turkey, though I've learned to like it when it's served, so when Thanksgiving day is just myself and my folks, we tend to go the non-traditional route. (My mother will never, never let me live down the year I put her to the trouble of cooking a full traditional turkey feast, and then refused to eat it; after all, I'd just wanted to see it made. That was what, twenty-five years ago? I'm sure she can get another twenty-five out of it.) As far as I'm concerned, stuffed flounder is a more-than-adequate replacement for a stuffed turkey. I could say more about the road trip itself, the local junk foods I probably looked forward to as much as the formal meal, the side trips to New Orleans, etc.; maybe I will if I find the time. Hah!

Then, once I got back to STL, it was right back to work. A pretty heavy week of Disaster Recovery prep, followed by Disaster Recovery Hell Week. After all kinds of scheduling problems, we finally had our first Disaster Recovery drill, as we (the IT department) attempted to reconstruct our data center from backups in an off-site facility. Just as we'd have to do if, for example, a radioactive meteorite crashes into Chesterfield, MO and releases a swarm of genetically-engineered alien battle insects intent on wiping out humanity. Truss plates must go on.

DRHW was, of course, both disastrous and hellish. A couple of systems worked right out of the box; most of them just went way through the looking glass on restore. Reinstalling Internet Information Services about five times before it works properly is not an experience I would wish on anyone in the industry who doesn't work for Microsoft.

So now, I've got a relatively quiet week. Relatively meaning I still have an apartment to clean before my folks come up for Christmas, as well as half my Christmas shopping left to do. I might even survive through Christmas. Maybe.

Not that I'm exactly happy with our current war in Iraq, but I just gotta say it: 0wnZ0r3D, b1Tch!