This one is too funny not to mention. Some entertaining excerpts:
Even Bush’s crap is classified top secret. According to our Austrian sources, Austrian newspapers are currently abuzz with special security details of George W. Bush’s recent trip to Vienna. [...] it was White House “toilet security” (”TOILSEC”), which has Austrians talking the most.
The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush’s personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush’s security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president’s bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush’s feces and urine and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine Bush’s waste material. One can only wonder why the White House is taking such extraordinary security measures for the presidential poop.
Even Bush’s toilet paper was flown in from the U.S. Air Base at Ramstein, Germany. In addition, Bush’s food was flown in from the United States and tested with special chemicals before he ate it. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot by a firing squad in 1989, was the last major European leader to constantly use a food tester. The last frequent state visitor to Vienna, who always relied on a food tester, was Adolf Hitler.
The Pig and the Box - by MCM
One day, Pig finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. Pig becomes so protective of his box, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he takes drastic measures. He forces everyone to take their copied items home in special buckets… buckets designed to protect.
Dr. Dave (author of Spam Karma) offered this deliberately non-specific warning on his blog today about a potential exploit related to enabling user registration in all current versions of WordPress.
He hesitates to give the details of the problem, since the lid is apparently still on pretty tightly, and so far there are no exploits “in the wild”. I generally disagree with this approach to security announcements, and have some issues with this one in particular, which I can elaborate on if anyone’s really interested, but it may be wise just to heed his advice for now until more info is uncovered.
The worst that could happen is it’s just a big practical joke to see how many people will respond to him “crying wolf”, but I don’t think he would really do that. The odd thing is that he said the WP developers have been notified, but Matt hasn’t heard anything about it.
The QUNU project is now bringing free, real-time tech support to all kinds of users, including those trying to work with free or open source software for which no official lines of support exist.
One of the benefits I see in this is answering the most frequently used reason that people choose not to use free or open source software in their businesses: the immediate availability of help when they run into a problem. Of course, those of us “techies” know that search engines like Google are often much more effective (when used properly) than official corporate support (for commercial and non-commercial products alike), and that there are already a lot of resources out there to help people install Linux, etc., but this is just one more outlet for that kind of thing, with a much quicker turn-around time and specific, personal focus.
Of course, there are companies (like RedHat and Novell) that use support as a part of their revenue plan, and I’m sure those will continue for various reasons (like having someone to blame when something goes wrong, even though that logic is pretty jacked up), but I’d love to see a more open support structure like this gradually overtake a lot of that kind of thing.
However, the thing I like most about this idea of the community being the support center is that it creates more avenues for non-developer type people to help out and contribute to open source projects. There are a lot of people out there who love the idea of this kind of software, but I think can sometimes feel held back from being personally involved if they are unable to contribute actual code to the product.
Things like this allow those kind of people to contribute in their own ways, and providing support is a huge need that a lot of people out there can probably fill, becoming a vital part of that particular project. I think it will be great to see this trend continue, and to see graphic designers and other types of “non-coder” people rally behind producing good products.
Following on the conversation about Spider-man 3 over on Dan’s blog, I think I’ve stumbled onto a suggestion that I think would work for pretty much every super-hero comic book based movie that I can think of.
The basic idea is that the movie (or at least sequels) should always open with a fight scene during which the primary hero is fighting a second string villain that they would be unlikely to use as a “main” villain in future movies. Right off the bat, scene #1, should be this battle, after which the defeated villain is carted away and never seen again for the rest of the movie, and the primary plot gets kicked off from there. The example in this case would be how I described my opinion of the role Sandman should play in SM3 (see Dan’s post for more specifics on that).
This would give you the following benefits:
- More action, without needing to set it up. People going to see super hero movies for the most part probably want a healthy dose of good, CGI enhanced fight scenes. Of course, you usually have to have the final confrontation with the main baddy of the film, but it really sucks if that’s the only fight in the whole movie. (It’s even worse if the scene is not that good, but enough about Fantastic Four).
- Being able to use characters you otherwise wouldn’t. Most of the mainstream comic book characters that movies are being made around these days have a large cast of villains that have accumulated over the decades of storytelling. Many of them would not make good “primary villains” for a single movie, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t make the cut until the 20th or so movie in the series, which even the most popular lines will probably never get to.
- Not wasting “main plot time”. This one is critical. One only needs to watch the original Batman movie series to see the quality go downhill dramatically as the continued to cram more bad guys into each film. Now, that’s not to say that avoiding it in this case would have made those ones any better, but still, it’s fairly clear to see that when you’re adapting what was originally told as a long running story (often over a period of time measured in years rather than minutes), it’s best to keep the storylines focused and not try to include extraneous stuff that only takes away time from the real story.
Another acceptable way of including additional characters (other than the opening fight scene idea described above) is like they’ve done (well) with the goblin storyline throughout the Spider-man movies so far - Harry’s story is a subplot that continues to develop and tie the movies together while still allowing each one to be fairly self-contained.
Well, it looks like my longest running streak yet of not talking about war or international political issues on here has come to somewhat of an end.
I do hope I can still keep it to a minimum, though, and not get worked up into 20 paragraph rants / arguments. It will be difficult, but I think it’s still probably a good idea.
Over the last few years I’ve tried several different webmail products, and I’m currently pretty happy with RoundCube.
I’ve tried squirrelmail, which I never really liked but is included in the package repositories for most Linux distros, so it was the easiest to set up. It does the basics, but it can be a pain to use now that UI standards have been significantly raised (specifically in the webmail arena, by apps like GMail).
Then I went to IMP, which was quite a bit better, but to some degree I think it tries to do too much and therefore seems unnecessarily complex to set up and configure if all you really want is a web based IMAP client with a decent UI. Also, the UI still wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
RoundCube, which I’m currently using now, is the one I like best so far. It doesn’t have a huge list of features, but what it does have it does well. It handles all the basic web based e-mail functions pretty well, along with some AJAX-y user interface pieces to make it look and feel nice to use.
For non-web mail, I still use both Thunderbird and PINE, but there are still times when it’s convenient to have a web based system as well. I also sometimes use GMail for some things, and while it’s really good it has enough negative aspects (for me) to cause me to not use it as my primary webmail application.
If anyone has any recommendations for this type of application (that you can run on your own server, not a hosted service), feel free to let me know.
“The Middle East is littered with the results of people believing there are military solutions to political problems in the region.” - U.N. Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown
Well, the first week of this didn’t end up working out very well. On the second day I came out to find my front tire totally flat.
I’m thinking about what my policy should be for entries in my tagboard that are obviously tests. It’s understandable that I will get these, since I’m hosting and releasing that tagboard plugin here, and people will want to try it out.
Even though I know the people probably won’t care, I still sometimes feel bad about deleting them, but that’s better than just eventually having a tagboard full of gibberish, I guess.