Welcome to My World

Jumping on the bandwagon about 3 years too late (heh) I’ve installed the Pingback module into this Drupal site to enable Willfe.com to receive and send pingbacks. With a bit of luck the installation has actually gone right (it seems to have gone just fine) and things are running smoothly. This post is mostly just being made to test the thing and to provide the very first Pingback from Willfe.com — to the module author’s post about the module (very recursive, I know ).

Edit: Heh. Figures. I broke something The module runs but reports an error (technically a “warning,” but the warning essentially says “sorry, buddy, this ain’t happening today!”) when it sends a pingback. I’ve asked the author for a whack from his clue-by-four for guidance

This isn’t actually a joke — the guy makes horrible films and needs to be encouraged to stop. Go sign this petition, already 250,000+ signatures strong(!), to put a stop to it before he hits us with another horrible film.

Oh, I forgot to mention: you’ll get free gum if the petition hits a million signatures.

I’m entirely unwilling to try to hide my giddiness as I recap the current standings in the 2008 Democratic Primaries: Hillary Clinton has lost. At this point, even if the two states that disqualified themselves by holding early primaries had all their votes counted at the Democratic Convention, she still wouldn’t have as many delegates as her opponent, Barack Obama, which means she still loses even if she gets Michigan and Florida counted. It’s done and over.

Clinton supporters can troll and boast all they want, but there’s just no even remotely plausible way for her to win the nomination short of Obama suddenly dropping out of the race. This opinion piece sums it up nicely, though: Hillary Clinton has firmly and defiantly reminded us all that she has “every right” to continue running in this race until a winner is decided. She absolutely does have that right. But she’s still a fucking idiot for doing it at this point.

Maybe to enlist more people? Maybe to scare up support for an expensive war in Iraq that, by many accounts, we’re losing (lives, money, and goals).

A recent advertisement by the US Air Force suggests that all your cell phone, GPS, and television viewing joy can be killed by a single missile. Fortunately for those of us living on Earth, that’s not actually true. Thanks, Wired, for pointing out the many, many flaws with this latest scare-mongering nonsense.

I don’t have much to add to this update on efforts to combat Microsoft’s modern-day attempts to spread FUD about Linux (that’s “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt,” in case you were curious — it was an old trick IBM used to use when it commanded the computing market a few decades ago), except to encourage you very, very loudly to go read it.

Microsoft is running a silly “Get the Facts” campaign, designed to distract people from the realities (that Linux and similar platforms are far more reliable and scalable, are easier to use and work with, and are (much) cheaper than Microsoft’s own Windows-based offerings) by spinning so much bullshit it’ll make your head swim. The article I linked to above steps through the latest efforts by the company to continue its smear campaign.

<sarcasm>Of course, Microsoft is really just interested in telling the truth (that nobody but Microsoft can see) about Linux. We’re just all missing the glaring reality. Microsoft has absolutely no motivations beyond just “exposing the truth” in its efforts to convince people to buy its products instead of going with the cheaper/better alternatives.</sarcasm>

It is 2008. The Salem witch trials are long behind us. But apparently, in Florida (the state that does its best every single day to earn its FARK, a simple magic trick is enough to make a school administrator fire a teacher for practicing “wizardry”. Additional coverage here.

The article even quotes the school district:

The Pasco County School District says there were several other performance issues, but none compared to his “wizardry.”

So, the district actually says the biggest problem with his performance was his “wizardry.”

Ugh. This is stupid beyond words. We’re too stupid to survive as a species. We’re doomed.

Well now I’m officially bummed out … when I lived in Colorado and was a member of the Denver Zoo, one of my favorite stops when I visited was the polar bear exhibit. Olaf (I never knew his name until now) the polar bear was the star attraction when the baby polar bear cubs and their mother weren’t out playing. He was a popular attraction there, and he did plenty of amusing stuff: swimming, pounding the glass to spook kids, lounging, and so on.

Apparently Olaf died last Saturday. It’s weird — I actually have pictures of him from an old camera (a really old one ) that I’m trying to dig up.

Well, rest well, you big old fuzzy bear! Thanks for always being a fun part of my visits to the zoo there.

Well, it sure didn’t take long for Dreamhost’s servers to buckle under the FastCGI-based “performance upgrades” on Willfe.com. Others have complained about it before, so I’ll just reiterate it here that sticking MySQL and the PHP front end on separate servers might sound like a good idea, but in effect it just really slows things down.

I’ve moved Willfe.com and the gallery to different hosting. I actually couldn’t move the gallery, and in fact I had to recreate it, which means graphics referenced in old posts are again broken until I find and update them. Sigh. Stuff should generally be much, much faster now, pretty much all the time. Unless a damned outage kills the box or the network

Note: Spammers and such, beware — all the same anti-spamming and DoS stuff is still up and running, so don’t think a host switch means free reign to blast the site with comment spam

My birthday brought an assortment of happiness this year, and despite my brooding about turning the “big” 30 (yeesh — talk about drama queen … my life is likely less than a third over, and “30” isn’t so big; hell, my voice cracked today as I was singing a song at karaoke, and I was told puberty ended in the teens ) I got all the warm fuzzies I needed given what happened that same week.

Friends and family both conspired to make the event memorable, and they succeeded. Despite that I’m over there all the friggin’ time, they managed to sneak around and snag some gifts for me without my having even a single clue they were doing it. My folks sent a very nice gift as well (it arrived a bit late since apparently the first attempt to buy it saw the merchant claim the beast was “damaged” at the warehouse before it could be shipped).

There was a big, nice leather computer bag (the gadgets and stuff I carry around finally outgrew the one I’d received last year from a former coworker), and within it were two books I’d expressed interest in (paperbacks, both science fiction works) and a gift card to snag some more once I burn through these (heh, not bloody likely anytime soon, as you’ll understand in a moment). The shipment from my parents was a 23-pound monster — the Complete Calvin & Hobbes, a three-tome compilation of every Calvin & Hobbes comic strip ever published.

This is the site’s 2,000th “node,” and barring a few management bits (categories, mostly), that means this is just about the two thousandth blog entry here on Willfe.com (gallery.willfe.com was also updated). Conveniently, this milestone comes as I successfully completed the arduous task of custom-building PHP for FastCGI on this DreamHost server, and to my surprise things actually are a decent amount faster. I haven’t managed to get APC (the caching beastie for PHP) working just yet, but should have that going shortly. Once that is working, things should go even faster.

Here’s to two thousand more posts on Willfe.com without a lawsuit!

Update: After much futzing around, FastCGI is properly enabled now and brought APC along for the ride. Holy shit, things are much faster now. Go play around in the gallery; it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye