Emerging Illusions last night went... well. I won't say it was spectacular, because nobody involved behind the scenes of a venture like that can ever go home without kicking themselves about slipping on something, but it went *well*. I didn't fuck it up too badly, woot. Also, curling up on the stage (!!!) did not leave my white clothes black. Yay!
Probably the worst bit was wanting to stay, and knowing that in order to get home at a decent hour, I had to go, like half an hour ago. I made it home safe, but am running on quite the sleep deficit today, nyar. Still, got to see some folk I haven't seen in awhile, and hang out. Also? An old crush of mine from Santa Cruz in a bright red waist cincher. Someone hold me up, plz. As embarrassing as that was, I think I managed to escape his gravitational pull before I actually started *drooling* on him or something. Woo.

Okay, so the *actual* worst part was that the last number had a "snow" effect. Except I think their snow blower was mistuned, and now I'm coughing up icky... stuff. Yay acetate foams? I honestly couldn't believe the performers weren't *dying* from the stuff, because I could hear the audience choking on it as well. Blech. I sound like I have the croup, but I'm pretty sure its just from the snow effect vapors. Narsty.

So, yes, hm. Dancing tonight! And then the Difference Engine gig at the Computer History Museum tomorrow. And maybe some sleepin' in between here and there.

I'm sitting here watching one of my new favorite shows, The Ultimate Fighter, which I got into midway through the last season.  For those of you not in the know, it's a reality TV competition for mixed martial artists, with the winner receiving a contract in the UFC.  In pretty much every reality TV show that involves people living together, at least some of the contestants end up hating each other; often, they nearly come to blows.  The best part of a reality TV show revolving around fighting is that, naturally, when that happens they actually do get to try to beat the crap out of each other.

(This has been kicking furiously around my head since about 3pm today. Please enjoy, and/or tell me what you think.)


She was sitting on the edge of the bed when I opened the door, a dirty pink housecoat pulled loosely around her, and an unlit cigarette held between fingers covered in nearly transparent skin. I stopped in the doorway when I saw her, cursing under my breath as I looked around the filthy room. This wasn't what I'd expected at all. I glanced down at the paper in my hand, Fiona's giant loopy scrawl of a note my only guidance: "Apt 1B, Mr. R Goldman, disturbance". Great - could she have been more vague? But it was too late to bolt now. I lowered my scrap of booking paper to see a pair of cataract-hazed eyes leveled at me over a mouth that looked as if it'd sucked lemons constantly for the last decade. She gave a short harrumph, and waved her cig in my direction.

"And I suppose YOU just wanna ignore me, too."
I sighed, crumpling the paper into a ball in my pocket. I'd have to remind Fiona to take better notes when booking clients from here on out. Even emergency ones. Even when they were hysterical on the phone.
"Now, ma'am..." I started, placatingly.
"Don't you 'ma'am' me, you sharp-dressed hussy. That's Mrs. Waters, to the likes of you. Ruth t'my friends, or what's left of them." She gave a short rheumy laugh and I winced again inwardly. I hate it when they have names. So much easier to treat them as a case, a faceless being or an entity disconnected from the rest of the world.
"Now Mrs. Waters, I'm here on behalf of Mr. Gold-"
"MISTER Goldman, HA! Now there's a laugh. That must be the first time Bob's ever heard him called MISTER." She sniffed, "The dumb lush don't deserve the honorific - hasn't in twenty years."
"Mrs. Waters, that's hardly fai-"
"Hardly fair my foot. Life ain't fair, missy, an' that's a fact. Fact is, an old lady can't get noticed fer nothin' around here these days, and that's why I'm stayin' put."
"I see."
I took a deep breath, gagging at the thick fug rising from the catbox in the corner and making a mental note not to make that mistake again.
"So if I can't convince you to leave-"
"Hardly."
"-then do you mind if I ask, why here?"
"Here's as good as any other place."
"Are you sure about that?"
She had the decency at least to have a guilty human motive behind the mask. "Well, Bob was always drinkin' and carousin' late into the night. I figured he could use a little shakin' up, if ya know what I mean. Figured if I'm going to inconvenience somebody, might as well do some good by 'em in the process."
"Aahh." I sighed. "Mrs. Waters, then you know that you're...?"
"Yup." She turned her steely, hazed eyes away from me and clenched her jaw, staring into the wall as if it contained the secrets to the entire universe. For all I knew, maybe it did. "Yeah, I know."
"So, why don't you go on? The next place is supposed to be better-" I looked meaningfully at the catbox "-has to be better - than this one."
She glared at me again.
"You think I ain't tried, missy? I get about six feet from the buildin' and I can't go no further. It takes me hours to get the strength to come back inside. And those ungrateful kids of mine? They pay the bills, sure, but they never call, they never write. I live two blocks away and they can't even see me!"
"I understand, I understand. But you can't stay here. You're bothering B... Mr. Goldman."
She frowned, inspecting the unlit tip of her cigarette sullenly. "Well I can't git, neither. Not 'till someone notices me."
"Well B... Mr. Goldman sure noticed you. He's too scared to come in the apartment with you here."
Mrs Waters gestured irritatedly with her cigarette. "Not ME, stupid." She pointed up. "What's LEFT of me."
I looked up then, in the direction she was pointing. It took several seconds of staring at the dark brown stain on the ceiling before the reality of the situation dawned on me and I started gagging again. Catbox, hell. No catbox would ever smell like that, not unless it was right outside a lion's den. A vicious, man-eating lion. Oh lord.

Her face was a study in malicious satisfaction as she turned to me again. "Yeah, I thought not. You know I'm gone, *I* know I'm gone, but does anyone else? No."

"So, what do you want me to do? What do you need so you can leave?" I fought to get the words out past my rising gorge.
"Hell if I know! You're the first person I've been able to have a conversation with in..." she paused, visibly trying to regain a sense of time, "... in awhile. Since right before Bob's last payday. Last time he was sober."
I could feel the blood draining from my face. "A month? A whole... how could they not notice for a whole..."
"I told you: the kids pay the bills automatically. But they never check in."
She gazed contemplatively at the ceiling for a moment. "I must be pretty ripe up there by now."
I swallowed convulsively. "Yeah, you must be. Listen, I'll call the coroner, 'cause that isn't my line of work, but, uh..."
"Gotta do the job you're hired for?"
"Yeah. Um, well, I am, just by talking to you, actually. But since you're still reasonable, and *mostly* civil- You want me to call a priest? A rabbi? A Brahmin?"

"A priest...?" she stared off into space for a short second, "A real priest, sayin' a rosary for me, maybe throwin' some Holy Water around?"
"If I can find one, yeah."
"That'd be..." she seemed to be having trouble keeping her thoughts from wandering suddenly "That'd be real nice. Thank you." She turned back to the wall, her eyes gone soft and dreamy, staring into eternity. I let myself out.

"Coroner's office? Yeah, this is Charlotte from- Yeah, that Charlotte. Listen, I just got a call out here, and I think you're going to want to look upstairs..."

We went to see Iron Man at the Metreon tonight. We stumbled into the middle of the San Francisco MovieBears showing. So the cinema was packed with bearded men. Luckily these days I've got a well trimmed beard, so I fitted right in.

Movie was good. I didn't get the bit after the credits since I'm not that kind of nerd. Robert Downey Jr was as usual great. Jeff Bridges kept reminding me of The Dude which was a little distracting, but the problem was just that his voice is distinct - he played is role really well. The depiction of the brave American invaders vs the cowardly Afghan defenders was a little annoying, but predictable.

This is brenda's rant on this you should do

1. Functions (or subs) should be small, concise, and to the point. Don't write functions that are > 100 lines.
2. declare your variables. use strict; E_STRICT;
3. put your virtual host config in seperate files, in sites-available. Don't appeand to existing files.
4. Give code enough db and os permissions to do their job and no more. the postgres users connecting from php does not need to own the database and every table. It should have things granted that it needs to do. The apache running as www-data should not have write permission anywhere unless it needs to have it.
5. use transactions!!!!! if you need to insert to 3 tables to save something, put it into a transaction so you don't end up with half of it failing and leaving the DB as a mess.
6. Put your data integrity rules into the data schema. It'll also be in your code, but having it in the database as well with means less bugs, and never more. You'll notice that you screwed up.
7. turn error_logging on, and CHECK YOUR ERROR LOG well before you deploy to staging. Don't wait until it's on production before realising that it's spewing errors at us.
8. don't copy paste similar things over and over in code. MAKE A SUBROUTINE!
9. name your methods properly.. A function called exists() on it's own, not inside a class, is just WRONG!
10. Use comments. Both inline as you go, and a doxygen to describe each function, define, class ... everthing needs describing.
11. GLOBAL variables are wrong. Use a static class or a define.

Pizza thursday is something we do at catalyst. We're a giant flock of geeks hacking opensource at work all day, so we stop to rant to each other on thursdays.

Check out the topics for the next pizza thursday:
* ccache: gcc's best friend
* "thing's wot I lernt about technical writin"
* a rant about licensing

I've been taking photos of my tshirts every day. It's been quite an exercise but I finally ran out of shirts I was willing to wear out of the house. I guess I'll have to retire the few that were left. Anyway, here's all 93 for your amusement or horror.

Most amazing disk data recovery ever

Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing.

Hello! I am looking for office space in Toronto. NORMALLY in these situations I look up "office space toronto" but holy crap, apparently "office space" is the same sort of keyword that "Romanian bride" is, in that there are twenty-thousand bottom feeders with generic out-of-a-box websites promising me "office space office lease office renting office rental office opportunities office make money online NOT A SCAM office spaaaaaace".

Thanks, INTERNET.

So does anyone have any hot tips or things along those lines for Toronto office space? I don't need much: room for 3-5 people, internet, and so on. Maybe a phone, I don't know.

check out my new cellphone handset.
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=152864203

Dear Lazyweb,

I suspect the answer to this is also "Apple horked it in a recent security update", but I still desire to know how to fix it. Lately, when I'm doing rsync+ssh backups of various machines, ssh craps out partway through. Ssh is running on MacOS 10.4 PPC (OpenSSH 4.7p1) with the latest updates, and is aimed at at various Linuxen that haven't been upgraded since, say, 2005 (OpenSSH 4.3). It dies like so:

rsync [...]
building file list ... done
...dozens of files get transferred successfully...
Disconnecting: Bad packet length 787964.

It's dying after transferring a bunch of data, not during connection setup. Both side are most assuredly speaking SSH2.

Googling this error message only results in very old threads where people say, "Oh, that's because you're using SSH2! You should use SSH1 instead." This answer is clearly bullshit. What's the real fix?

• 19:10 There's a fine line between a crepe and a burrito, bu... Wait, no there's not! Does not look like crepe! #

(posted using LoudTwitter)

There's a write over at the google opensource blog on wellington's first gay geek dinner:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/05/wellington-geeks-keep-on-rocking.html

Put together by Brian Logan, it seems they had a great time.

I was sad to miss it while I was stuck in Hamiltron watching giant V8 Super cars crash into concrete barriers.

A few years ago, I bought this cute little USB hub from Fry's. It was one of those faux-Apple style pieces of hardware, with that milky-glass look, ultra-small and stylish. I used it to connect my keyboard, mouse, and printer to the laptop, but the printer only worked when it was connected directly instead of through the hub. I cursed Linux. Then I started working on the Macbook Air with the same setup. and when the printer didn't work with Mac OS X, I cursed printer firmware writers. Then my keyboard kept inserting random characters, kind of like there was an echo delay. It didn't do that when connected directly, only through the hub. Hey... wait a minute... I switched to the new even cooler USB hub I bought on a whim last time I was at Fry's, and voila, printer and keyboard work perfectly. It never even occurred to me that it could be hardware.

Oh yeah, the Macbook Air. I love it.

So - ROFLCon! It was a fun time.

It was different from most comics conventions, probably because it wasn't a comic convention. It was an Internet Convention, and what that meant was a big focus on the panels and only a few tables with people selling stuff - I didn't bring anything to sell anyway! It was also unusual in that all these webcomics people were invited (Joey, Rich, Jeph, Jeff, and more!) but only me and Randall and the Cyanide and Happiness guys were on panels talking. I got the impression they did this with a lot of other niches too, so the overall experience was more of a peer-to-peer convention, where walking around you were bound to run into someone awesome.

It was pretty surreal. Jay Tron Guy Maynard was a big hit, and very easy to photograph. I didn't end up getting a chance to talk to him, but I did listen in on his panel, and I wanted to tell him how I respected how he took all the internet hate he got with his first costume and turned it into something pretty great. I also met MC Frontalot for the first time, and let me tell you, he's really fun to talk to: after listening to his voice for years, just having a conversation with him gave me this feeling of listening to a secret hidden MC Front track, where he's just, you know, shooting the breeze. Nice. I didn't get to talk to Matt but I wanted to tell him I like the way he's living his life.

Interesting panels for me were hearing the different perspectives on community and news between the Reddit team and Drew from Fark and the OC Remix guys. OC Remix is a video-game remix/cover site and it's been one I've been reading for five or so years, so it was a thrill to meet them and thank them for the Jazz Plumber Trio cover.

Here's a picture from the panel Randy and moot and I were on:


_{from Scott at Laughing Squid, who took some awesome pictures}

WHO ARE THESE HANDSOME PARAGONS OF THE MALE FORM?? I was worried about the panel: moot and Randy have huge audiences, so I was touched when the moderator said "Here's Ryan North from Dinosaur Comics" and there was all this applause. I was honestly surprised to be that well-received! We all got tons of applause for just sitting on chairs up there, which was insanely flattering. Thanks, everyone! The talk was streamed but I don't know if it's available online anywhere after the fact. M-Maybe?

Anyway IN CONCLUSION it was fun and surreal and I'm really glad I was invited to go talk and be famoused for a weekend!