Category Archives: Hero of the Day

Dual Successes

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We’ve spent weeks preparing for a group presentation in one of my classes. And tonight it all came down to the wire. We were all really nervous, and frankly, I thought we did pretty badly. But the professor’s a down-to-earth guy, so after class one of my members mentioned, “We did so bad!” or something to that effect. And he glanced around to make sure the other groups that went weren’t around, and told us, “I can honestly tell you that your group’s presentation made my night.” And that made my night.

And then when I was upgrading Apache I screwed up and deleted the vhost configuration files. And it’s one of those things I never understood… I tried recreating them but they never behaved in a way that made any sense at all. I’d load them and get errors that made no sense, or the server would just act in strange ways. I finally got it to the point where the blogs worked, even though nothing else did, so I left it. While there are nice GUI tools for Apache, they’re not much good on a headless server. (And no sane person runs X remotely on a server, since it’s a needless waste of CPU and running VNC would make it even worse.)

I just spent some time reading up on vhost configuration, and just got it right… I had the syntax all wrong the first time along, to the point that I’m surprised the server was coming up at all. I think I’m actually going to put together a static page on how to properly set up vhosts, because in my searches for help I found a lot of people with similar problems.

E-mail Gates

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This is surely not a revolutionary idea, but I’ve never seen references to it before. I forward my mail to my GMail account. I do own two domain names with mail services, though, but I just forward what I need to my GMail account.

Some sites require an e-mail address to sign up, and they send you a confirmation e-mail, so it needs to be real. However, I have no interest in letting them e-mail me long-term. The general solution is a “throw-away address.” You use it once and then delete it.

Here’s an idea that seems a little less wasteful to me. I call it an e-mail gate. I can set up a forwarder pretty easily. As long as I’m logged in, it’s just a few seconds of work. I can also remove a forwarder in a few second’s time.

So you might have an address like matt@gate01.ttwagner.com. (This sub-domain doesn’t even exist right now, so don’t bother trying it.) I can “open the gate” (turn the forwarder on), sign up on the site, get my confirmation e-mail, and then “close the gate” by turning the e-mail off. Consequentially, any crap they send will bounce back with a “No such address” message. But when I want to get e-mail or a lost password reminder, I can just turn the gate on for a minute. Unless you’re getting inundated with spam (e.g., tens of thousands a day), opening the gate for under a minute won’t be enough time for much crap to get through. Unlike throwaway addresses, you can use the same address as multiple sites, making it easy to remember what address you used.

It’d be neat to write some code to give a web-based interface to this. I think I need to get it working with some mail daemon that supports a MySQL database of users, though, since it currently involves putting the address in a text file, updating the address cache, removing it, and then updating the cache again. It’s quick if you’ve got a shell open, but it’s a bit of a pain to script.

Police Trivia

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Through the school paper, I’ve been talking with some of the supervisors in Campus Police. The guy I interviewed last night is the perfect person to interview: you ask him a question and he’ll talk for a while, so it’s not a round of 20 Questions. Some of what he said isn’t really relevant to the article I’m working on, but it’s really neat anyway.

For example, would you ever have thought that:

  • Repeated studies have shown that an officer whose shoes aren’t shined is significantly more prone to being attacked? Not, presumably, because criminals secretly have major OCD, but because, on a subconscious level, it communicates that the officer is not at the top of their game. Or at least that’s what researchers have theorized.
  • If you’re an officer with a holstered gun, and someone comes at you with a knife, if they’re closer than 21 feet, they’re going to stab you before you can fire. This one surprises me a lot. Five feet and I could see them lunging at you. But 21 feet seems like an incredible distance. I remarked about how surprisingly high that was, and he told me that they periodically demonstrate it at the range: someone stands (well off to the side so they don’t get shot) 21 feet away, and, when a signal is giving, the officer pulls his gun and fires at a target, and the guy 21 feet away starts running. Every single time, he’s past the shooter before they get off their first shot.

Gutsy Applications Menu

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Posting this in the hopes that it’ll be useful to someone else, because it certainly took me a long time and caused a lot of frustration.

There’s a bizarre bug that a few people, myself including, have run into when upgrading to Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon release: the applications menu is blank.

Some recommended deleting ~/.config/menus/applications.menu, but, in my case, this didn’t recreate it.

Here’s a tip, though: there’s an /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu. Copying it to ~/.config/menus/ fixed my problem. And now, I have an applications menu. Hurrah!

Conversations, Poor

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A conversation I had yesterday.

What I thought was said:

Me: *picks up a bag of Cheez-Its he brought to meeting*
Them: “Where did you get those?”
Me: “I got it over in Adamian, at the vending machines.”
Them: [incredulous look]
Me: “I was going to go to Einstein’s for a bagel, but the line was too long.”

What was actually said:

Them: “Oh, nice haircut!”
Me: “I got it at the vending machines in Adamian!”
Them: [incredulous look]
Me: [discusses attempt at dinner]

Mmm, bacon.

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It’s amazing what the Internet has unleashed. Today I stumbled across a mention of the Vosges Bacon Chocolate Bar. It was an amusing typo, I thought: it almost sounds like a chocolate bar with bacon in it. My roommates have long joked about my love for bacon. (A local pizza place offers a dish known as the “heart attack,” which is a calzone stuffed with mozzarella sticks and bacon–its name is well-deserved. But ohhhh is it good.)

But it turns out that I hadn’t misunderstood anything. It is a chocolate bar with bacon in it. Sitting on a hot tip like this, though, I knew I had to act fast, so I sent the link to the Snack Maniac. Barring the Maniac’s ghostwritten entry, the Internet had gone a whole month without any snack updates, so I’m proud to take credit for leading to the first update in a month. So proud, in fact, that I may have to take todays “Hero of the Day” designation away from [deep breath] the man suing to keep his amputated leg that he stored in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed but was inadvertently sold when he missed his rent payments and is now used by the guy who bought the smoker at an auction as some sort of bizarre exhibit in his backyard[deep breath], and instead give it to myself… (The Hero of the Day designation, not the amputated leg stored in a barbecue smoker in a self-rental shed.)

Having recently resolved that I need to focus on eating healthy, I was thrilled to learn that the Snack Maniac was sending me a bacon-chocolate bar of my own. And while I confess that I don’t have the experienced palate of the Snack Maniac, I’ll be sure to post an update on how it tastes.

News Article of the Day

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A man in South Carolina is in a desperate legal struggle to get custody of his amputated leg.

If the piques your interest… It’s not the strangest part of the story. You see, the man lost his leg years ago in a plane crash, and stored his leg in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed, but failed to make his rental payments, so they sold the smoker with the leg inside. The new owner charges people to see the leg inside the smoker, and refuses to give it back to the man from whence it came.

Today’s Hero of the Day secures a solid spot in my list of daily heroes.

Prints

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I saw some mention of BigPhotoHelp.com as a good place to get prints. It seems that they’re a smaller business with some nice printers, as opposed to a giant corporation. And yet they’re cheaper than the competition. (And they don’t offer tacky crap like coffee mugs with your picture on them.)

I did a little Photoshopping to get my skyline photo to be an appropriate format (it’s a bit cropped, so I added some white space on the bottom with text). It came to about $20 shipped Priority Mail which is a steal for a 20×30″ image even before you include shipping. (Now I need to find a cheap 20×30″ frame!) Their little wizard suggested that 19×29″ (how ironic) was the upper edge of what would still look sharp, but I went for 20×30″ anyway. We’ll see. (Actually, it was a few experiments in one — I used an obscure font for the text, which looks great but may not reproduce well. It does show up in their preview fine, though, so I think I’m golden.)

Military Intelligence

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Rusty, who doesn’t actually use his own blog because he is a lazy slacker, sent me this link last night.

Apparently,

  • The architect never noticed that he had just designed an enormous swastika-shaped building for the U.S. Navy.
  • The U.S. Navy never noticed, until it was too late, that their architect had designed an enormous swastika-shaped building for them.
  • People on the ground were oblivious to the fact that the building was shaped like a swastika. (I, for one, notice the shape of buildings?)
  • There aren’t, say, fire exit plans posted everywhere in the building depicting the building as an enormous brick swastika.

That said, Hitler did forever destroy our ability to use what’s probably a good layout for an office complex.