“What’s taking them so long? We’ve got work to do! Dammit, if I could get in there, I’d fix it myself!”

"I'm pretty sure that's why you can't get in there."

— overheard outside the server room...

Dear iChat,


perl -i- -ne '$s=1 if />ASCIIFilename

Yes, I really hate pasting text into a chat window and having something like “(bug 4558)” turn into “(bug 455stop smiling!”.

"...you never get rid of the Dane"


From CNN, a little something for the folks who insist that paying tribute to pirates is a perfectly sensible economic transaction, and one that the recipients deserve for the hardships the West has inflicted upon them:

Piracy accelerated after the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s and began to flourish after shipping companies started paying ransoms. Those payments started out being in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

Oh, and yesterday they opened fire on the US-flagged food-aid ship that was transporting the American captain who had been held hostage by that other group of deprived, honest fishermen (who didn’t get the millions of dollars they politely requested at gunpoint).

[update 4/26: two recent data points worth noting]

Earlier Sunday, Kenyan maritime groups said Somali pirates had released another Yemeni freighter and its 15 crew members. The ship was seized in January with a cargo of petroleum products.

...

Separately Sunday, the captain of an Italian cruise ship said his security staff fought off a pirate attack in the region Saturday with pistols and a water hose. Commander Ciro Pinto told Italian media the ensuing gunfight damaged the ship, but the 1,500 passengers were unhurt.

Hello!Project Sing-along Project


Koharu: “Stop right there!”

more...

Dear Blizzard Entertainment,


Your understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is seriously flawed. I’m watching the Connection Info window for the current World of Warcraft patch, and its behavior is, to be kind, pathetic.

With any halfway-rational client, this would be one of the healthiest swarms on the planet right now, but all I see is an endless stream of connections with other machines that all have data that the others want, but refuse to share. If you were doing anything right, I’d be frantically throttling my connection, because I’m sitting on a 100 megabit pipe with 99.9% of the patch. As it is, I’m occasionally uploading at 8 kbps for 30 seconds or so to a machine that then disconnects, and that’s enough to give me a 1.22 ratio.

Editing: it's not just for dead trees


Latest headline on Slashdot:

Mozilla Mulls Dropping Firefox For Win2K, Early XP

Took me a moment to parse that the way they intended…

"This. Is. My. BROOMSTICK!"


#!/bin/bash
cd deferred
find . -type f | split
for i in xa*; do
    for j in $(cat $i); do
        echo -n "$j " #literal tab
        postcat $j | awk  '
            /^From: / {f=$0}
            /^To: / {t=$0}
            /^Subject: / {s=$0}
            END {printf("%s\t%s\t%s\n",f,t,s)}'
    done >> /tmp/jfoo
done

Open in Excel, sort to taste, cleanup as needed, save for later use...

Hello!Project Telepathy Project


Ai says, “OMGWTFBBQ! ROFLMAO! Can you believe this? They forgot to put feathers on my hat!

more...

Hello!Project Telepathy Project


Reina asks, “God, why can’t I get that Duran Duran song out of my head?”

more...

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”