Got a report today that a certain featured news article wasn’t displaying correctly on our boxes, due to some kind of Javascript error. When I read the details, I laughed out loud.

The article was titled “Sexless Marriage.”

The debug output from the box was “missing builtin member.”

…1995 Edition. This is what happens when your senior sysadmin leaves, and there’s no one left with even a tiny grasp of what the job involves. It happened to OSU-CIS; don’t let it happen to you!

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As disgusted as I am by the behavior of the administrators and school board in response to this incident, it made me feel good to read the story, because the parents didn’t just roll over and let their kid get screwed.

It’s not quite as obscene as the 12-year-old in Florida who was taken away in handcuffs for the crime of splashing in puddles at school, but in both cases you have allegedly-sane adults willing to claim the actions were appropriate.

I think I know who really deserves to be removed from the public schools, and it isn’t the children.

So, I’ve returned from my little road trip to Las Vegas, and I bless the kind soul who let me know that Angela was the X-Mate for this month in ‘X - An Erotic Adventure’ at the Aladdin.

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The good news: the Indiana Jones movies will be on DVD in November.

The bad news: the box set includes “Temple of Doom.”

There’s a story I love to tell, a cautionary tale about an incompetent manager, his ass-covering sysadmins, and the company that they could have destroyed together. At some point I’ll write it up here, but the short version goes like this: “two-thirds of the file servers hadn’t been backed up in six months, and they knew this.”

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Lots of folks are busy documenting the bad things about Safari (I sent in about a dozen bugs, and I’ll wait for the next beta before looking again). One good thing I noticed is that it has the appropriate hooks to make OS X’s summarize engine work. Select the text on a page, tell it to summarize, and you get a dynamically condensed version of the text. If the interface weren’t so clunky, it would be really handy for deciding if you really want to read further in someone’s site.

It would be trivial for the developers to add a button to the toolbar that selected the body text, called the summary service, and returned the results in a new window, nicely formatted. Since Safari is more-or-less scriptable, I was able to knock together a quick AppleScript that shows off the idea. Drop it into ~/Library/Scripts and run it on whatever page you’re currently looking at.

So, I just got another notice about a sleazy bastard printing out my photographs and selling them on eBay. Joy. This is the sort of behavior that led me to stop posting large JPEGs a while back.

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