Sheer genius
http://www.xkcd.com/c230.html (Crop to just panels 1-3; it’s funnier that way.)
http://www.xkcd.com/c189.html (I think this explains the popularity of martial arts at MIT.)
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Thu, 08 Mar 2007
Fri, 09 Feb 2007
Mario Meets Yahoo
TechCrunch has a gushing post about Yahoo! Pipes, which is some sort of graphical RSS-feed-editing service. You can drag little boxes around to combine news feeds, deleting posts that match certain criteria, keeping others, and publishing the result as a new RSS feed.
I can think of some uses for this, but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Michael Arrington.It’s very slick, but I’m not sure who the intended audience is.
To Yahoo’s credit, the UI is so intuitive that in a few minutes, I’d whipped up a new feed for Guy Kawasaki’s blog that strips out his oh-so-cute minced oaths “bull-shitake” and “full of sushi.” Here’s what it looks like:
Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to replace the phrases—I could only delete the offending posts in their entirety. Call it collateral damage in the war on preciousness.
Tue, 02 Jan 2007
Outage ended
If you sent mail to any @barillari.org address between early September and late December, it most likely did not get through. The mail server for barillari.org stopped working in early September. Because the vast majority of the mail sent to @barillari.org addresses is bulk mail, I didn’t make fixing it a high priority. My apologies if you sent anything to a @barillari.org email address during that period — it should be working now.
Tue, 22 Aug 2006
Mon, 10 Jul 2006
You know the market is saturated when…
I was reading a blog post when a button bar at the bottom caught my eye:
It’s a bunch of links to different social bookmarking systems. I counted 42 distinct sites.
Who knew that so many even existed?
On that note, don’t miss Targeting an audience of 53,651. Excerpt:
As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.
Mon, 03 Jul 2006
davfs2 shenanigans
[Hardcore nerd post. Non-geeks, please ignore.]
WebDAV is a nice, lightweight, widely implemented network filesystem protocol. davfs2 is the client implementation for Linux, which lets you mount a remote WebDAV server.
Heaven forbid that you should confuse it, though. If you confuse davfs2 (as I did, by trying to unmount the same share twice), you might get this delightfully cryptic and mildly ungrammatical error message:
/sbin/mount.davfs: Process 5852 already uses device cfs0. Maybe it's only a stale pid-file left from unclean shutdown. Please clean up manually.
Notice the lack of any hint as to where that pidfile is. The phrase “Maybe it’s only a stale pid-file left from unclean shutdown.” doesn’t appear in a Google or a Yahoo search; I hope putting it here will fix that.
I thought I’d be smart about this. “I know!,” I said, “I’ll use
strace!” (strace prints out all of the
system calls that a program makes, so you can get an idea of what its
inputs and outputs are.)
strace -o foo mount /path/to/mountpoint
Of course, strace revealed not a word about pidfiles, device cfs0, or the long-dead process 5824. Neither did ltrace.
Eventually I realized/remembered that mount was
(fork/exec)ing mount.davfs, so strace wasn’t picking up
anything that happened after the fork—which is when all of the
interesting stuff happened.
Thankfully, strace has a switch that makes it hang on to
all child processes: -f. So,
strace -f -o foo mount /path/to/mountpoint
…revealed the last few things that mount.davfs was doing:
6475 write(2, "\n", 1) = 1
6475 setresuid32(-1, 0, -1) = 0
6475 access("/dev/cfs0", F_OK) = 0
6475 open("/dev/cfs0", O_RDWR) = 5
6475 chown32("/dev/cfs0", 0, 100) = 0
6475 chmod("/dev/cfs0", 0660) = 0
6475 getuid32() = 0
6475 setresuid32(-1, 0, -1) = 0
6475 ioctl(5, CIOC_KERNEL_VERSION, 0xbffffc54) = 0
6475 open("/var/run/mount.davfs/cfs0.pid", O_RDONLY) = 6 <------ AHA!
6475 fstat64(6, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=5, ...}) = 0
6475 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7fe8000
6475 read(6, "5852\n", 4096) = 5
6475 write(2, "/sbin/mount.davfs: ", 19) = 19
6475 write(2, "Process 5852 already uses device"..., 129) = 129
6475 write(2, "\n", 1) = 1
6475 exit_group(1) = ?
6474 <... wait4 resumed> [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 1}], 0, NULL) = 6475
6474 --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
6474 exit_group(1) = ?
Note the “AHA!” above. The pidfile was in /var/run.
I have no idea how /var/ is supposed to be arranged. Some
things make sense – logfiles are in /var/log, mail boxes
live in /var/spool/mail (depending on your setup). But
some things make no sense: mysql databases live in
/var/<b>lib</b>/mysql, as if that makes any sense. (They
aren’t code libraries!) I suppose that /var/run makes
sense for pidfiles but why couldn’t it be something obvious like
/var/pids?
(I know. I know. That would be too easy.)
Update: The source of the problem that prompted me to mount and
unmount davfs2 until it died and left behind a stray pidfile was also
in /var/ – the /var/cache/davfs2
directory. As it turns out, if you remove files behind davfs2’s back,
it can get confused, spewing errors like this:
/sbin/mount.davfs: Connection failed, mounting anyway. File system will only be usable when connection comes up.
When I looked at the network dumps (using tethereal "tcp port $PORT" -i lo -d tcp.port==$PORT,http -x -w path-to-output,
which I highly recommend), it turned out that davfs was requesting
files that I’d long since nuked. Blowing away the contents of the
/var/cache/davfs2 fixed the problem. (Why the heck do
these hang around between mounts, anyway?)
Thu, 08 Jun 2006
The shark jumps me
I used to pride myself on coming up with awful ideas before they appeared on the Internet.
So, when I said to myself “hey, why hasn’t someone taken this mashup silliness to its logical conclusion and made a National Sex Offender Registry/Google Maps hybrid?”, I was disappointed to discover that someone had already done that.
I’m still waiting for the crimelibrary.com/Google Maps “Jeffrey Dahmer Walking Tour” mashup, though…
Sat, 22 Apr 2006
Advice for the friend of an obsessive webalizer-checker
Dear Mr. Mouthpiece,
I have a friend who obsessively checks her web site statistics and flips out if she doesn’t get enough visitors since her last look (typically every 5-10 minutes). I’m worried — what should I do about this?
Harried at HMS
Dear Harried,
If the site is a blog, which I suspect it is, the obsessive stat-checking is typically a manifestation of a condition called novel hypertext-specific spectrum disorder. It frequently occurs in bloggers who are new to the web and haven’t yet become disgusted with the whole business. It doesn’t appear in every blogger; my suspicion is that your friend wasn’t hugged enough as a child. That said, if she really wants website traffic, post a link to her site in a forum devoted to trolling blogs. She probably won’t thank you, but at least she won’t be concerned about the lack of traffic after that.
Best,
Mr. Mouthpiece
Sat, 21 Jan 2006
Yowch!
Ed Felten’s blog: “Privacy is for Google what security is for Microsoft.”
(In context, it looks like this translates to “Privacy disasters could hurt Google, just as security disasters could hurt Microsoft,” rather than “Google is as concerned about privacy as Microsoft is apparently concerned about security.” Before I read the context, though, the latter seemed more likely.)
Thu, 19 Jan 2006
Conspiracy of the week: subtle crypto-fascism at MSN
MSN Search has a neat little “quick facts” search service – if they know the exact answer to a query (e.g., “king of spain”, “babe ruth ERA”), it will display it just above the search results. A recent release announced the addition of 10^6 more facts:
It’s not perfect, of course:
First, there’s the obvious problem that he isn’t. Second, doesn’t “Leader of Germany” usually conjure up images, not of the prime ministership, but of a certain historical political office?
Tue, 17 Jan 2006
Larry Lessig and the AMV kids
An “AMV” or “anime music video” is a fan-produced recording made by overlaying a soundtrack with spliced-together clips from Japanese animated films. Needless to say, a good deal of the source material (both audio and visual) in the “AMV scene” is used without permission, which has raised the ire of some of the copyright holders.
Larry Lessig posted today about music-industry opposition to the kids who make AMVs, lamenting it as the latest effort by Big Media to hammer the Internet into a “consume-only” medium.
While I’m generally sympathetic to Prof. Lessig’s arguments about copyright, the AMV scene strikes me as a particularly misleading example. An typical AMV contains several minutes worth of a movie or movies and the entirety of a recorded song. The defense in a copyright-infringement suit would face an uphill battle. But there’s no reason AMVs have to be distributed that way – it’s an issue of technology, not a legal issue.
There is nothing about modern computers that prevents AMVs from being distributed not as an audiovisual recording, but as a set of instructions a computer program could follow to assemble the AMV from the source material. If you (the viewer) have all of the source materials on your computer, the program will reassemble and play the AMV. Some media owners might sue, but their chances would be considerably less likely (Galoob v. Nintendo, for instance, confirmed a user’s right to apply patch-files to media they own.) As a bonus, the AMV files would be much smaller – a few kilobytes, instead of several megabytes.
If the AMV scene wants to avoid copyright problems, technological solutions are well within reach.
Mon, 12 Dec 2005
Another few hours of my all-too-short youth irretrievably lost
[Warning. Hardcore nerd post.]
In the process of writing a web application with mod_python, I had to restart my web server. A lot. Apparently, Apache 2 (the web server in question) doesn’t like this, and starts dying on boot with error messages along the lines of
[Mon Dec 12 02:23:17 2005] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock
…although the disk had plenty of free space and no shortage of inodes.
I Googled this quite a bit. A number of sites suggested looking for zombie semaphores with ipcs and deleting them with ipcrm. But when I ran ipcs, all I got was
$ ipcs ------ Shared Memory Segments -------- key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status ------ Semaphore Arrays -------- key semid owner perms nsems ------ Message Queues -------- key msqid owner perms used-bytes messages
It took me way too long to realize that ipcs was showing me the semaphores that I (user=jdb) owned, not the ones that the web server (user=www-data) owned. [Slaps forehead.]
Oh well. Live and learn.
So, to actually trash all of the unneeded semaphores (why is there a limit on these, anyway?), become root, stop apache, and type something along the lines of:
for i in `ipcs -s|grep www-data|tr ' ' '\t' |cut -f 2`; do ipcrm -s $i; done
Sat, 01 Oct 2005
I wonder if Miss Manners has an entry on this
I just got a short email from a reader of the UN-Internet-takeover article. I tapped out a reply, only to get this message back:
I apologize for this automatic reply to your email. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand. If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience. Click the link below to fill out the request: https://webmail.pas.earthlink.net/wam/addme?a=(rest snipped)
If someone sends me email expecting a reply, they ought to add my address to that “approved” list. Any non-brain-dead email software would do that automatically. It looks like the writer used a feature provided by the mega-ISP Earthlink, a company that really should know better. (As an aside to my correspondent, my apologies if your ISP forced this on you.)
I don’t plan to click – it just encourages this sort of thing.
Wed, 28 Sep 2005
Sun, 10 Jul 2005
Backlog finished
Finally finished processing all of the photos from the eutrip, plus some others from June and July. They’re posted here.
(Apologies for the server outage last month – I think it was a DHCP issue.)
Sat, 21 May 2005
Dale Carnegie could take lessons from Yahoo
From: Yahoo!Shopping <rate-merchant@store.yahoo.com>
To: joseph barillari
Subject: Yahoo! Shopping Merchant Review for ArtCity.com - order#
artcity-com-26790
Dear joseph barillari,
Thank you for your recent purchase on Yahoo! Shopping.
Our records indicate you recently made a purchase from ArtCity.com.
Please take a moment to rate and review this merchant. By rating and
reviewing merchants, you can help other customers find merchants and
provide those merchants with feedback. It's easy - just rate the
merchant and add any helpful comments.
Before you start, review our Merchant Review Guidelines at this URL:
http://shopping.yahoo.com/merchrating/general_info.html
Yahoo! reserves the right to refuse or remove any review that does not
comply with these Guidelines or the Yahoo! Terms of Service and
terminate your Yahoo! account (including email) for a
violation. Yahoo! is not responsible or liable in+any way for ratings
and reviews posted by its users.
Mmm, now there’s nothing like threats to make me want to waste five minutes of my life reviewing a web merchant…
Tue, 19 Apr 2005
Full disclosure works
Timeline (I think this is everything important):
| 13 Apr 01:28:45 -0400 | Phishing email exploiting unchecked redirect arrives |
| 13 Apr 01:54:51 -0400 | Emailed webinfo@capitalone.com to report it |
| 13 Apr 01:53:00 -0400 | Blog post posted |
| 13 Apr 16:29:45 -0400 | Inform Capital One of my intention to post to bugtraq in 24 hours |
| 13 Apr 16:31:11 -0400 | Capital One form letter arrives: “this [phishing] email has not compromised Capital One’s systems in any way,” |
| 13 Apr 16:44:42 -0400 | Reply to Capital One form letter: “this email has taken advantage of a compromised Capital One system: Capital One’s website redirects URLs without checking them….please see the note about bugtraq below” |
| 13 Apr 16:47:15 -0400 | Another form letter: “A Capital One representative will respond to your e-mail inquiry, usually within 24 - 48 hours. Please note, due to high email volumes, this timeframe may be extended to up to 72 hours”. I wonder if saying “bugtraq” provokes this response. |
| 19 Apr 16:32:15 -0400 | Four business days later (well beyond 72h), redirect is still unchecked. Post bug to bugtraq and cc Capital One |
| 19 Apr 16:53:46 -0400 | Reply to Capital One (signed by a human?) form letter: “the point is that the phishing email has exploited a flaw in Capital One’s systems. Your website permits unchecked redirects. This makes a phisher’s job much, much easier. |
| 19 Apr 18:01:00 -0400 | A bugtraq subscriber tells me that he’s emailed abuse@capitalone.com (I should have thought of that) |
| 19 Apr 14:27:05 -0800 | Another bugtraq subscriber tells me that it’s fixed. Checked myself — apparently, it is. |
| 19 Apr 18:55:38 -0400 | Send email to webinfo@, thanking them for fixing the unchecked redirect. |
Wed, 13 Apr 2005
Gah! Capital One enables revolutionary new “phishing” feature
A phisher just sent me an email claiming to be from Capital One, inviting me to enter my account information at his website. Unusually, Capital One is actually faciliating this scam: they provide an unchecked redirect feature on their website, so the URL actually starts with http://www.capitalone.com. Captial One then redirects the user to the phisher’s site!
If this link still redirects to Wikipedia, then the problem hasn’t been fixed yet:
From: "Capital One Representative: Kristina Barker " <Kristina.Barker@capitalone.com> To: 2bslashdot@barillari.org Subject: Error: Your Capital One Account Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:25:00 -0800 X-Spam-Score: 10.407 X-Spam-Flag: YES X-Spam-Level: ********** (10.407) Capital One is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of buyers and sellers. To protect the security of your account, Capital One Bank employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the Capital One Bank system for unusual activity. We recently have determined that different computers have logged onto your Capital One Banking account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons. We now need you to re-confirm your account information to us. If this is not completed by April 14, 2006, we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner. In order to confirm your Online Bank records, we may require some specific information from you. Click below to verify your account http://www.capitalone.com/redirect.html?linkid=SECURITY+VALIDATION&dest=http://24.232.117.142/bin/capitalone.com/ Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure meant to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporaly suspend your account. Thank you for using Capital One Bank! ----- End forwarded message -----
Wed, 23 Mar 2005
Oh, so that’s why no one replied to my email
While wondering idly why no-one had replied to my emails for a while, I checked the status of the spool and received some delightful news:
jdb@bigbox:~$ mailq 2005-03-22 16:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-22 18:06:25 837 bytes 2005-03-22 18:07:12 25462 bytes 2005-03-22 23:09:25 1144 bytes 2005-03-22 23:28:17 2990 bytes 2005-03-23 00:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:01 562 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1068 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1206 bytes 2005-03-23 04:22:01 2054 bytes 2005-03-23 06:38:54 18937 bytes 2005-03-23 08:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 10:38:16 2898 bytes 2005-03-23 10:42:10 2547 bytes 2005-03-23 10:43:40 2010 bytes 2005-03-23 10:44:26 1038 bytes 2005-03-23 11:22:40 523 bytes 2005-03-23 13:27:31 1401 bytes 2005-03-23 14:56:11 982 bytes 2005-03-23 16:14:35 3904 bytes 2005-03-23 16:28:01 561 bytes 2005-03-23 16:37:41 943 bytes 2005-03-23 19:35:21 494 bytes 2005-03-23 21:04:18 6257 bytes
Mail had been backing up for the past 24 hours and I hadn’t even noticed it. It wouldn’t be the first time this had happened – frequent wedging was one reason why I switched from exim to nullmailer, on the principle that a simpler mta would be a more reliable MTA (that, and Harvard firewalls port 25, so there was no point in running a real SMTP server anyway).
Restarting nullmailer cleared the queue, but left me wondering how to notify myself next time this happened. I couldn’t use email, for obvious reasons. I considered having a sound play through the speakers if the queue seemed wedged, but that would only work when I was at home.
I settled on a cron job to periodically dump the output from mailq to a file. My RSS reader, feedonfeeds, now prepends this file’s contents in giant honking red letters to my RSS display — procrastination via RSS now has a purpose!
While writing this, it occured to me that another solution would be to alias mutt to a script that alerted me if the queue was non-empty before running mutt:
#!/bin/sh
# warns user if WATCH's output is nonempty before running mutt
MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
WATCH=/usr/bin/mailq
TMP=`/bin/tempfile`
$WATCH > $TMP
if [[ -s $TMP ]] ; then
less $TMP ;
fi
rm $TMP
$MUTT
Tue, 22 Mar 2005
How to score an above-the-title slot on the Drudge Report
By now, everyone’s heard of the website whose owner promises to butcher and eat Toby, his pet rabbit, unless he receives US$50,000 by the end of June. As with the infamous Bonsai Kitten, Snopes says that it’s a hoax.
Toby’s owner had the right idea, but he wasn’t exploitative enough: I’d like to see a website whose owner vows to have an abortion unless she receives some enormous amount of PayPal donations in the next nine (eight…seven…six..five…four…) months. (Bonus points if the “mother” fakes her photo the old-fashioned way using a balloon, rather than just stealing pictures from Google Images or launching Photoshop.)
Maybe Drudge will dust off his flashing-police-beacon animated GIF for this one.
Sun, 19 Dec 2004
Egregious Abuses of the Internet, #25913
So, there I am, innocently reading a Wikipedia article on a man of leading cultural significance. Then I follow the link to the Amazon.com page for his biography. For some reason, Amazon treats ELinks users to a “Sponsored Links” section that Firefox users don’t get to see. And one of the sponsored links, for reasons I cannot fathom was…
Lonely Wives Club: A dating site for married people.
From their “Testimonials” section:
charact55 Maryland-Baltimore
Lately, it seems like when dealing with females, all there is is emotional problems. But on LonleyWives, most of the women just want to have fun, and that is music to my ears.
Nope, nosiree, I can’t imagine the crew on this site would have any emotional problems. Seeking clandestine romantic fulfillment elsewhere is the hallmark of a healthy relationship and stable emotional status.
I am sorely tempted to submit this as an ALOD. Or maybe I’ll just start my own section for these: I’ll call it OMG Egregious Internet Abuse – or OMGEAI. Hmmmm… In fact, I will do that. Watch this category.
Wed, 25 Aug 2004
Work-avoidance mode
This site always gets more attention when I should be doing real work – as such, revamped the photos section’s layout, uploaded a whole mess of new photos, and even started organizing them by keyword.
If you should be doing something useful right now, by all means, have a look.
Fri, 20 Aug 2004
Aftermath of the latest outage
The barillari.org server’s motherboard (a GA-7VRXP 2.0) bought it several weeks ago, and barillari.org has been offline ever since. My apologies. I’ve recently resurrected it. There may be further downtime in the future, until the server moves to Boston with me at the beginning of September.Mon, 21 Jun 2004
Thu, 03 Jun 2004
barillari.org reestablished
barillari.org is now at its summer home. The pipe here is much narrower (cable modem vs. massive massive campus bandwidth), so go easy on the spidering.
Wed, 02 Jun 2004
Outage beginning
Barillari.org will be shutting down today. It will be back up in a few days, operating from its summer location.
Sat, 29 May 2004
Potential outages
This site may be offline periodically in the coming weeks, starting June 2. Any outages should be temporary.
Sun, 02 May 2004
Necroterrorism
Third hit on Google for “necroterrorists” (I guess they’re funded by smuggling corpses instead of drugs, like their narco- cousins) is an index of “death metal” bands. I’ll file this in the “people who take themselves way too seriously” category:
| INTERPRET | TITEL | KATEGORIE | MEMBER |
| Gardens of Gehenna | Dead body music | sonstiges | meden |
| Genital Grinder | Genital Grinder | death metal | meden |
| Gholgoth | Somnus Mortis Imago | Black Metal | meden |
| Ghoulunatics | King of the undead | death metal | meden |
| Gnosis | Another selfmade luminary | speed thrash | meden |
| Gnostic | Evoking the demon | Black Metal | meden |
| God Dethroned | Ravenous | death metal | meden |
| Godless | Let there be darkness | Black Metal | meden |
| Godless North | Summon the age of supremacy | Black Metal | meden |
| Godz at war | Postmortem | death metal | meden |
| Gold Fuer Eisen | Heimat | heavy metal | cyberbloodgoat |
| Golden Pyre | Necroterrorists | death metal | meden |
| Golem | Death never dies | death metal | meden |
| Gomorrha | Sexual perversity by autopsy | death metal | meden |
| Gorath | Haunting the december chords | Black Metal | meden |
| Gore Blister | Art bleeds | death metal | meden |
| Gorelord | Zombie Suicicde Part 666 | death metal | meden |
| Goretrade | Ritual of flesh | death metal | meden |
Sun, 11 Apr 2004
Absolute links
After the n-th person mentioned it to me, I finally changed the relative links in the RSS feed to absolute ones. If you still can’t see the images or click the links, drop me a line.
Fri, 12 Mar 2004
Outage! Outage!
Sometime on or before 11 March 2004, Verio’s DNS servers decided to stop pointing barillari.org to this computer. Instead, they redirected all hits to barillari.org to a “Welcome to the Future Website of Barillari.org” domain-parking page.
I fixed the DNS records, but it will take days for them to propegate. Needless to say, I will not be continuing with Verio as my registrar. I’m in the process of transferring the domain to another. More to follow.
Wed, 03 Mar 2004
Uncanny PageRanking
Blast it. Google’s on to me — I’m up to #20. (But only with Moderate SafeSearch on, which is the default.)
Tue, 17 Feb 2004
jigl wins the gallery generation wars
I’ve investigated a number of different web image-gallery generators for my site. My primary requirements are that the system generate static HTML and images (i.e., no CGI, no PHP, no MySQL, no SSI, none of that dynamic crap), that it scale large images and provide links to the unscaled versions, and that it not look like crap.
For a while, I used fgg, which, when hacked a bit, produced reasonable results. But it had some irritations: namely, it scaled images by a size ratio, rather than to a particular size. And, while I liked its minimalism, I was looking for something a bit less spartan.
igal is a nice tool, but it didn’t do scaling the way I liked, either. And none of the preset layouts really cried out to me. (I do use it when assembling sets of graphs for my independent work, however.)
Today, I stumbled on jigl, which is amazing. It’s a single perl script, the site supplies a wonderfully subtle background theme (the default isn’t as attractive), and it does image scaling almost the way I like it (it accepts a target Y value, rather than a target X value, for reasons I can’t quite fathom.)
I plan to use it for future collections—especially subsets of the photos in the photos section, like this one.
Fri, 13 Feb 2004
The Depsotism of the Check-Box
I recently came across a form that looked like this:
Regrettably, they neglected to include a checkbox titled “anything nuclear.”
Fri, 30 Jan 2004
Next thing you know, Red Hat manuals will come in .doc format
| Google has a mailing list for media types – you can subscribe using the link in the lower-right corner of this page. Given that they’re girding up for war, I’m surprised they picked this mailing list hosting service: |
|
Thu, 15 Jan 2004
An Open Letter to the Vice-President for Information Technology
From: Joseph Barillari <jbarilla at princeton dot edu>
Subject: Netscape, IE, and the future of campus standards
To: Betty Leydon <betty at Princeton dot EDU>
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 20:39:44 -0400
Dear Vice President Leydon,
It was with reserved pleasure today that I read that OIT has retired
Netscape Communicator 4.7x. As your announcement indicated, that
browser was obsolete years ago, supported web standards spottily (if
at all), and was generally unfit for use on the modern Internet.
However, that pleasure was quickly quelled when I read that OIT would
not only be standardizing around Internet Explorer, but would not be
replacing the aging Netscape with one of its more modern successors.
I realize that the corporate organs of this University would prefer to
standardize around a well-supported browser. IE, with the vast
majority of the Web's market share, is a natural choice in this
regard.
However, the academic organs of the University (if I may speak as a
cell in the undergraduate organ) do not benefit from a homogeneous
computing environment to an extent that outweighs IE's many
well-documented flaws. The Web Standards Project documents several,
namely:
* No support for attribute selectors (Windows/Mac)
* Incomplete support for PNG (Windows)
* No support for the W3C event model (Windows/Mac)
* No support for adjacent selectors (Windows)
* No support for border-spacing (Windows/Mac)
* No support for position: fixed (Windows)
http://www.webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/
These flaws are not fatal to a browser used to access corporate
applications (PeopleSoft, for instance), because corporate
applications are designed around these flaws. They are, however, quite
injurious to academic users, who generally use their web browsers to
browse the /entire/ web, not just the subset designed around omissions
of Internet Explorer's engineers.
As free operating systems like Linux gain support in China, India,
Brazil, and other countries with low Microsoft market penetration, an
increasing set of web authors are coding to the published web
standards, rather than to the ad-hoc rules created by long-unfixed
bugs in Internet Explorer. Content authors in these states feel no
need to tiptoe around the mistakes made by Microsoft's engineers. Nor
could they -- they often have no access to Windows machines. Other Web
authors, disgusted that some of the best features invented by the W3C
are foreclosed to the entire Web audience because IE users cannot
utilize them, have chosen to employ those features anyway, as a means
to encourage web users to install standards-compliant web browsers.
Viewing web content as it was meant to be viewed requires a
fully-standards-compliant web browser. Internet Explorer does not fit
the bill. Microsoft recently announced that it will /never/ fit the
bill -- they have retired the stand-alone Internet Explorer. Until
their next-generation operating system is released, IE will not be
updated. And the new version that accompanies that OS will not be
back-ported to OIT's standard OS, Windows 2000.
It is in light of these reasons that I ask, on behalf of my fellow
cells in the academic organs of this University, that OIT include, as
an alternative to IE, a modern, standards-compliant web browser on its
student cluster machines. Both Mozilla 1.4 and its corporate cousin,
Netscape 7, fit the bill admirably.
I would be more than happy to discuss this matter further at your
convenience.
Regards,
Joseph Barillari
--
Joseph Barillari -- http://barillari.org
Tue, 13 Jan 2004
Email outage
Quick summary: If you sent me email sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, chances are good that I didn’t get it. Please send it again.
Here’s why: (Don’t read if MTAs bore you.) If you sent me mail between evening on the 9th and 10th, chances are, I never saw it – because the spool partition filled up, sendmail started rejecting messages, and as near as I could tell via my limited tests, fetchmail started dropping them on the floor.
This was unacceptable.
I killed the fetchmail process, uninstalled the program, and configured getmail. getmail was missing two of fetchmail’s features, but neither were deal-breakers.
The first was the biggest: getmail didn’t support IMAP. And OIT didn’t support secure POP. Fortunately, the CS department does support secure POP, so I started forwarding my mail there.
Secondly, it didn’t have a daemon mode – the author suggested running it from cron – which is designed to run tasks no more than once an hour – unless you paste them in for every minute of the hour. And even then, it’s still running them only once a minute. A minute! Such a far cry from fetchmail fetching my mail every two seconds.
A little shell script came to the rescue. I opened a screen window and ran
until false; do scripts/sgetmail; sleep 10; done
where scripts/sgetmail was
#!/bin/sh /usr/sbin/stunnel -c -D 4 -d 8110 -r pop.cs.princeton.edu:995 getmail killall stunnel
Sun, 26 Oct 2003
Department of Ironic Juxtapositions
One of Google’s new services offers ads that match the content of articles appearing on news websites. Recently, the New York Post ran an article about a murder in which the victim’s body parts were packed in a suitcase. Google put a suitcase ad beside the online version of the Post article. [@nzoom]
I suspect that we will be seeing lot of juxtapositions like these.
Tue, 02 Sep 2003
Outage Over
Sometime on or about the evening of August 28, the
barillari.org server went down. I assume the cause was a
small power outage. Service has now been restored.
Wed, 27 Aug 2003
ObReferer
One of the minor delights of running a web server is that once it gets picked up by the major search engines, your logs will start to look like they were written by a lexicographer on acid. Observe:
email contact of silent rich men
infrared imaging of penis
mri scanner penis sex
penis in vagina mri
seclusion and physical restraints in schools
blog male exhibitionist large penis
wow snacks
celery and abortion
fanny pic of the crusades
bison or gunny or rearranged or willful or inefficient
interact or drapers or statutory or cooks or microsoft
benab or mackintoshite or injunctive or taxed or outroyal
attaching or freshmen or dodecahedron or mailable or suggestion
I suspect that the last four lines are from WebCollage.
Sat, 16 Aug 2003
Update to Blosxom 2.0; background redesign
This site now runs blosxom 2.0. The calendar and category menu are implemented in 2.0’s new plugin architecture. The layout template is Tropical Blosxom from semiosphere.info. The background photograph is from my archives.
The RSS feed is now 1.0-compliant. If you notice charset-compatability problems in your RSS client (in other words, accented characters come out as garbage), please drop me a line.